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Johns Hopkins says there are 48 reported coronavirus cases in the Bay Area. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to estimate how many cases, reported and unreported, there really are?
Deaths are much harder to hide than cases, so that’s where I’d start. The problem then becomes: which denominator should I use? SK has tested over 100k people so their infection figures are probably fairly reliable, they have 7134 cases and 50 deaths by the last count (0.7% deaths). Applying it to the US as a whole (17 deaths) that implies 2425 cases (vs 433 reported, 5.6x). So maybe 270 cases in the Bay Area?
Of course this approach is fairly laggy as it takes a while for people to die, and gives different estimates depending on which part of the curve you’re on.
Are they? Most deaths are old people with pre-existing conditions, so unless somebody bothers to test the patient for the virus, either pre-mortem or post-mortem, it’s easy to brush them off as natural until they become statistically anomalous.
Speaking of statistically anomalous, if your sample size is small (which should be the case for “corona virus deaths in the bay area”) then dumb chance could badly mess up your estimates.
An interesting data point (assuming that deaths are hard to hide): Germany. It has 1040 cases, and none of them has died. By the time Italy had this amount of cases, it had twenty-something deaths, even South Korea had 10. This could indicate that only a small fraction of the cases are detected in most other countries, and the fatality rate is much lower than thought.
A way to confirm this theory would be to look at the rates of positive tests: it should be lower in a country with more extensive testing. In South Korea, it’s 3.8%; in Italy, it’s 14,8%. I can’t find data on the number of people tested in Germany.
This matters for how bad the epidemic would get if everyone got infected. It doesn’t really matter for how much risk of death you are at right now. If the ratio of total cases to deaths is 10 times as much as you think, that means both that your risk of catching by going out is 10 times higher than you think, and that the disease is 10 times less deadly than you think; the two considerations cancel out each other.⎄
Afaik some of the earliest cases in Italy were “very bad” cases in elderly people, who are at higher risk of dying. By contrast, in Germany, most of the early diagnosed cases were workers and travelers in their thirties and forties, plus their contacts who may not have had any significant symptoms at all.
Most of the 1000+ German cases were diagnosed last week, so some of them may yet die. According to local news, at least 3 people are considered to be in critical condition at the moment. Another one was critical but has improved, so they might not die after all.
This was true in Italy, too, when it had a similar number of cases. Germany went from 151 cases to 1112 cases (still no death) from March 2 to March 9. Italy went from 79 cases (and 2 deaths) to 1128 cases (and 29 deaths) from February 22 to February 29.
Comparing Italy and Germany, Italy has more old people, and a poor health care system.
eh. No. Italy has literally one of the best health care systems in the world. Yes. Italy. Rank 2 in the world, according to the WHO, and
A better one than Germany does by just about every measure.
I like to bring this up when people claim the US cant possibly implement a good healthcare system, because it makes it explicit that this amounts to an argument that the US system of government is worse than Italy.
I’ve also heard this, and according to Wikipedia, Italy has one of the highest life expectancy in the world, but also according to Wikipedia, Italy has less than half hospital beds per capita than Germany. I suppose that for medical emergencies where lots of people require hospitalization at the same time the number of beds pro capita is more important.
Legatum prosperity index 2019 differs from WHO ranking.
(But my ‘poor’ was too hard. Apology to all Italophiles.)
Beds per capita is a very poor measure of quality medical care. If everyone who calls an ambulance has to be stuffed into a bed because the EMTs are poorly educated and can provide no first aid(this is a thing), you have more beds but a poorer overall system. I’m not familiar with the German and Italian systems, but I think many measures are going to end up looking similar.
How many people has Germany tested, and how reliable are their tests? I’d be wondering whether maybe Germany only has fifty actual COVID-19 cases, but they’ve tested fifty thousand people using a test with a 2% false-positive rate.
At least in Sweden positive cases are retested. If the false-positive rate of test and retest is uncorrelated and Germany use the same retest regimen then false positives could not be a substantial part of it.
@markus
How much evidence do we have that either of those things are true?
@acymetric
None that I know about.
There should certainly be good documentation on the test if someone knows where to look.
If the false-positive rate of test and retest is uncorrelated
This seems a heroic assumption under the circumstances. It seems plausible that there is a coronavirus variant which consistently causes a false-positive result on the Covid-19 test, and which is much more common in Germany than Italy (weather, perhaps?). There could be a slightly defective reagent in the tests Germany uses which consistently causes a false positive on something other than Covid-19. A microbiologist could probably come up with other possibilities.
I can’t find it now, but the Economist had an interesting approach where they worked back from the expected mortality rate. Basically, the reasoning was, assume the “true” mortality rate is somewhere between 0.1%-1%; in a particular area the mortality rate is X% for X>1; then the expected number of real total cases is X/1-X/0.1 .
There are a bunch of assumptions here that don’t necessarily hold (uniformity of death rate, statistical significance of current rates, etc) but I still thought it was an interesting approach.
Right, that’s basically the same approach as Anon. above. Probably the best refinement would be to do the same by age brackets, since a change in proportion of over-60 and over-70 cases will change the numbers a lot.
Use a long tailed T test! They’re the best.
I posted this question here, and the consensus was up to 10x as much, using very naive guessing: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/fc76p9/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_02_2020/fjwzl9z/
I honestly don’t have the right background to come up with a good number but I feel like being able to do this anywhere near reliably would be to first start by looking at the virus spread through other communities and how it was being reported during the early days?
It feels like the “early days” numbers for each outbreak were both highly variable, and not necessarily strongly correlated with the size of the outbreak later on.
Take Italy for example, according to WHO data, Italy had 3 or fewer confirmed cases leading up to the 21st of February, however, it had take that long for the Lombardy cluster to be identified, at which point the numbers rose to 9, to 76 on the 23rd, to 128 on the 24th, etc. etc.
Nothing about the numbers being published for Italy prior to the 21st showed any indication of the size of the cluster about to be discovered.
My guess is that these “early day” numbers only reflect the quality of the the tracking during that period, and the circumstances that might effect it (such as the suspicion that the formation of the Lombardy cluster was driven by the presence of an asymptomatic carrier).
The Atlantic links to a paper trying to estimate the true number of coronavirus cases in Iran that might offer some possible paths? There’s a lot of guessing going on (the reported number of infected in Iran is about 6,500, the estimates in the paper range from 500,000 to 8 million) and I don’t have the statistical background to evaluate their methods, but possibly something to look at.
In Contra Contra Contra Caplan On Psych, after I posted that I supplement B12 and it’s eradicated my particular depression symptoms completely, @BlackboardBinaryBook asked me what dosage of B12 I’m using. First of all, sorry I’m only responding now! Secondly, since I can’t respond to the original article any more, but I do want to answer, here it is:
Only a little! I take two ~10µg pills (cyanocobalamin*) every day. (Although sometimes I forget.) My initial regimen was one ~10µg pill every day, but this only just pushed me up from “less than half of the minimum B12 in [my] blood” to “just barely over the minimum level of B12”, so I’m taking two to be sure, but also not freaking out when I forget. (I forget about once every two weeks.)
Also only just today, I came across @Seppo‘s report of B12 related mood swings; Seppo has been taking a much higher dosage than I did, which may be muddying the waters, but it’s a very interesting development, nonetheless, and I’m really happy to hear about even a partial success! Since it was quite a while ago and I only commented in that thread today, and it might be lost altogether, I just wanted to put my emphatic thank you for the report here in the current open thread!
* sidenote, from my understanding, methylcobalamin would almost surely be better than cyanocobalamin for anyone just experimenting with over the counter B12 supplements, since it’s entirely possible to have absorption issues with cyanocobalamin that would be bypassed by the methylcobalamin form, but the reverse does not appear to be true. So if you too are considering giving it a shot, and methylcobalamin is readily available to you, it’s probably better to try that. I’m fortunate that cyanocobalmin is sufficient for me, despite my wonky absorption.
Oh! Also worth noting for the casual reader: B12 does not appear to have any toxicity whatsoever, but other B-vitamins do. Sometimes B12 comes bundled with e.g. B6 in the same supplement – you probably don’t want to try that without testing your levels of B6 first. So if you want to experiment with B12, do it with a pure B12 supplement.
Are you swallowing these pills? The stuff I’ve encountered is a liquid you put under your tongue, with the presumption that direct absorption is more reliable?
I’m just swallowing pills, yeah – as simple as it gets. 🙂 That’s a good point to make, though! Also a good way to increase absorption. Although if one has complete malabsorption of B12, I’d just go all out and get it in syringe form.
From a few Open Threads back:
@Well… says:
I’m pretty sure Nina Simone “won” in that thread, but with an expansive fefinition on “the blues” here’s another nomination: Changes as performed by Charles Bradley, it’s a Black Sabbath/Ozzy Osbourne done in the style of ’60’s Soul/R&B (think Otis Redding and Al Green), and it’s incredible!
For a Black Sabbath song done in a more traditional “country-blues” style here’s: Warpigs, performed by Ritchie Foster.
I don’t remember if I commented the last time around, but “Crucifiction Lane” by Procol Harum qualifies (though some people may not accept that as a “real” blues).
What does it mean to be “thankful”? Must one be thankful to a person, or is it possible to be thankful in the abstract? I am having trouble clarifying the concepts here.
This topic came up when I noted that while some of the good things that happen to us result from the kindnesses of humans, others substantially result from seemingly impersonal natural forces. A spiritual/religious person could attribute a personality either to nature or to a creator of nature, and feel thankful to that personality. Can an atheist feel thankful for the same natural phenomena? Or do they fell a different emotion instead?
I didn’t get it for a long time either. The first chapters of All Things Shining by Dreyfus explore this in context of ancient Greek religion, and it really cleared things up for me.
There is an amusing parallel with the feeling you get after you e.g. steal an apple from a neighbor’s garden – “I really shouldn’t have this, and yet I do”. There is a LOT of stuff in your life for which this is the proper approach, most of which gets thrown your way through dumb luck or other people’s actions. In a way, it’s the direct opposite of feeling entitled to something.
I definitely feel your reservations around this – the usual context in which people are talking about spiritual gratitude is either meek, God-fearing Christians or yoga moms, neither of which appeals to me.
Hrm. I’m an atheist, and I -intensely- dislike the “I shouldn’t have this, and yet I do” feeling. I don’t like entering raffles, for instance, because winning makes me feel worse than losing.
Is thankfulness really “I really shouldn’t have this, and yet I do”? At the very least I would modify the phrase to “I am not automatically entitled to this, it would not be an injustice if I did not have it, and yet I do have it”. I don’t think thankfulness is about guilt over having something which you shouldn’t have.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough. This is not about guilt, this is about winning, in the monkey-brain sense of having something good that you didn’t predict. Stolen apples taste better.
Christian here!
I don’t think it’s necessarily a feeling you have to aim at something. For me, it’s split up like this:
1.
The effort one makes to appreciate what one has. A lot of people’s default is “my life as it is is bad, and needs to be improved before I feel good about it”. I trend towards this. I can also force myself to acknowledge good things I have and feel good about them.
This can get trite to explain really quickly, but at one point Scott was talking about economic growth, and explained that the average American is richer than a historic sultan, who (presumably) felt pretty good about his wealth. You and I have a choice to either feel good about this objectively high level of quality of life, or feel like it isn’t enough for a variety of reasons. A lot of it is voluntary, just like any emotion.
At this point we are completely a-religious; we can cultivate an attitude of in general not feeling bad for oneself but instead focusing on positives. This is probably a pretty good thing, and would probably make most people feel better if they put time and effort into it. At the least it’s unlikely to make anyone feel worse, and has a chance of improving things. That leads us into:
2.
So now I split with the atheist, because I am now taking the cultivated attitude from 1. and giving credit for my life’s positives to a deity.
For me this is an important step because I actually believe he is responsible for the positive things in life and life itself, and that I don’t deserve the things I have and he’s nice to let me have them. So now I’m doing a “giving credit where credit is due” thing, with some added importance because the credit is due to a guy I think is very important. In my belief system, it’s actively bad to not acknowledge things that are true about him; owning up to his God-ness is one of the main tasks I exist for.
So you have those two parts, and they are entirely possible to separate from each other. From the Christian point of view you are now doing a bad thing – acknowledging good things but not their source – but as an atheist, that’s not a huge deal to you.
The big deal then isn’t whether or not you can have the attitude – you can as easily as I – but whether or not (as an atheist) the attitude is worth having . For me there’s some built in profit there isn’t for you, so I’m doing it whether or not it’s likely to make me happier, richer or healthier. You have to weigh those things – is it worth the effort? Is it counterproductive in some practical way?
Full disclosure: I’m a whiny little baby and in fact very bad at being thankful about anything but my wife.
The average American can’t actually afford a palace and some of the other things that the Sultan could afford, so the American is not actually richer in every way. Should the stuff that the average American can afford make them happier? This is hardly objectively true. It can even be true that we can now afford some things that make us less happy, while we can no longer afford things that made the Sultan more happy.
However, the really substantial criticism is that in status competitions, buying power is less relevant than your place in the hierarchy. Someone who is relatively very rich in their society, but poorer than the average person in another society, gets benefits that the average person in the other society doesn’t get.
Another important criticism is that quality of life is not just about how rich you are, but also what you need to do for it and how much free time you have to enjoy your wealth.
If I’m reading you correctly you seem to be making the argument that I’m wrong about how rich we actually are; that’s probably substantially true. But I want to be clear that this was a casually chosen example – what I’m talking about doesn’t depend on my wealth relative to the sultan in a substantial sense.
Take a hypothetical Sultan who has much more than us himself – he’s a substantially rich guy and people have to do what he wants, he probably has a lot of real hot wives, etc.. But he may not feel good about this; he might want to own neighboring kingdoms, or he may not like the responsibilities of being a sultan, or he might stress out about his own mortality constantly. Maybe he’s got a whole Ozymandias thing where he’s worried about being forgotten. It’s possible for him to have (relative to his data) everything, but to not choose to appreciate it.
Now take a hypothetical subject of the Sultan who has next to nothing – he works 12 hour days of brutal labor to barely supply himself with a drafty hut and poor-quality food. His family often goes without. Though he has (relative to our data) nothing, it’s possible for him to cultivate an attitude of being happier about what he does have than the Sultan.
Take the actual current me; Last year I made 34k, about. This year I’ll make 48k. My life has improved substantially; I’m doing much better than I was. But my income is still at joke-levels compared to most SSC’ers, I can’t easily afford health insurance, etc.
I can choose to be pretty happy about the big jump my life has made towards financial health, or I can choose to focus on the distance I have to go before I have a middle class quality-of-life, which is substantial and which I’ll probably never actually make. I also could take a hybrid of both. All three scenarios represent a choice of viewpoint that, over time, have an effect on how I feel.
In both cases I’m doing a lot of the same stuff on a practical level – I’m working hard to learn my job better and get raises and prepare for my next quitting/getting a new job cycle in any case, so my financial outlook is similar no matter what I go with. But this has (for me) a massive effect on how I feel, and a huge effect on how much of a psychic load I lay on other people I am close to. So I try, as much as I can, to minimize how bad I let myself feel about all the stuff I don’t have and to maximize how good I feel about the stuff I do have.
The biggest result this has is probably on my kids, who don’t feel poor and beaten down because I’m at least good enough at thankfulness to not be moping around the house wanting things at all times. They don’t have to be ashamed of their father, which I’d imagine is a net plus for them.
This is all the step 1. stuff from above – doesn’t require a deity. I think there’s space to argue about whether or not it’s really a net benefit in the absence of a god (what if thankfulness demotivates?) or possible (are people in control of how they feel?).
Super short version of all this: what I’m talking about isn’t really “you are richer than a sultan, feel great about that” so much as “you have a situation of some kind, and you are at least partially in control about how you feel about that situation”. I think it’s in a person’s benefit to nudge their view of their own circumstances upwards towards the positive, but even if I’m wrong about this I’m pretty damn sure the ability to do that is about as accessible to the atheist as to the believer.
Your kids might get a hierarchy reality check if/when they end up in school with a bunch of kids who buy status with their parents’ money and your kids can’t play that game. Just because you teach them not to be ashamed doesn’t mean that their classmates will feel the same.
—
Ultimately, there is optimism/gratefulness (appreciating what you have) and delusion (pretending that you have or don’t lack something), with no clear boundary, yet they are different things.
PS. The long-dead Sultan can’t actually compare his situation with modern Americans, so if one compares these to each other, why not compare modern Americans to future ones (or even the future American poor), who might be way richer or otherwise better off than us?
I’m not sure this is relevant in the same way I’m not sure I’d use “Well, sharks are still a thing, they might get eaten by sharks” as a way to try to de-emphasize the importance of swimming lessons. Unless training oneself to choose to look look positively on their situation makes this worse somehow, which I’m not sure it does.
Sure. I can imagine versions of this very easily where somebody goes “well, everything’s fine, I guess; no need to try!”. A good version of this goes “Well, I don’t have everything and I live with significant imperfections; I will try to improve things, but it’s also important that I try to improve my outlook as much as possible”.
I’m a little confused; I never suggested that he would compare himself to us. I said his life was great according to the data he has, but it’s still possible for him to feel negatively about his life if he indulges himself in that direction.
As for comparing yourself to some hypothetical Utopian, I’m sure you could, and I’m sure there’s some utility in doing so (we do something like this when we think about the potential of automation and work towards that, for instance).
I get a feeling – perhaps unsubstantiated – that you are trying to convince me of something like “feeling thankful us stupid”. I think there are plausible arguments for this. I noted earlier that someone might argue that thankfulness works as a demotivating factor, for instance. If you believe that or something like that, that’s fine and I’m not trying to discourage you for a lot of reasons – it might be true that it’s counterproductive for you personally, for instance.
What I am trying to do is answer the thread-starter’s question of whether thankfulness is accessible to him like it is to a religions person. To do this, I’m explaining what thankfulness is (to me, an individual christian person) and then stating that thankfulness as I experience it is mostly available to him even from an atheist’s mindset. It’s “yes, thankfulness is something you also could do”, not “yes, thankfulness is a net good for the atheist and I will fight to the death for that idea”.
@Aapje: that’s a very antagonistic take on society. Should we spend the rest of our lives conforming to elementary school mentality?
People who view life as a status game seem very unhappy, regardless of their position in said game. Perhaps the only way to win is to not play.
That’s not an elementary school mentality. Elementary school is just the first time kids notice it, because it is the first time they get repeated, consistent, daily interactions with other kids (modulo Kindergarten). Status games are for life; middle school kids play them, high school kids play them, college students play them, working adults play them, and retirees play them. And status game have real consequences; they can determine who sleeps with whom, who gets what job, who gets promoted, who gets fired, who offers who what deals, who does favors for whom, etc.
I mean, that’s what I do, but it takes a truly autistic, introverted person to become a social hermit. If you want to have anything like a normal social life, you will have to play status games, and yes, lack of money will hurt you. To fit in, you need to be willing and able to spend at least as much money as the other members of your peer group.
Treating status games as low-status is a high-status move. Whether or not you can pull it off, of course, is a different question altogether.
@GearRatio
I’m not so much hoping to convince you of a particular point of view, but rather, trying to present some alternative ways of looking at things. It’s up to you and other readers to do with that as they want. Caveat emptor.
That’s fine. Just be aware that some early Christians ‘thankfully’ let themselves be fed to the lions (damnatio ad bestias).
@a real dog
Other people play the status game, as well as the quid-pro-quo social gift giving game (which also typically requires money), so not playing often means losing. You may call that antagonistic, I call it realism.
@Thegnskald
Being so good at it that you can do it in a non-obvious way is high status. With enough status/skill, you can even define status to some extent (although this is typically limited, requiring skill to stay within the limits).
Truly not playing status games is low-status.
Thankfulness is the emotional realization that something has happened to make your life better than others. Expressing thanks is attempting to get others to agree with this realization. The realization is a fantasy.
To me, thankfulness comes from contrasting my present state with a counterfactual worse one. That counterfactual *could* be “Man, I sure am glad I’m not that chump who lives down the street from me” but it definitely doesn’t need to be. In your cynical framework, how do you interpret expressing thanks (rather than thankfulness) to someone specific for something they did/said/were to/for you?
No one ever does anything for another so no thanks are necessary. People do things for their own reasons. Of course, we need to sometimes play the game and pretend people act with our interest in mind if we are feeling the need to control them…but it is just a game of “let’s pretend.”
“Expressing thanks is attempting to get others to agree with this realization.”
Really? If someone gives me a gift, they’re already very aware that they gave me a gift. Generally they are more aware than I am. Expressing thanks is a way of showing that I realize they gave a meaningful gift, because that doesn’t go without saying.
Expressing thanks is doing what is expected. If someone gives you a “meaningful gift” it is because they want to be important to you, and you surely should acknowledge their importance or you will pay the price. In reality, they have done nothing to make your life better, only attempted to insert themselves into it for the credit.
Why can’t a gift make my life better? I can kind of understand your claim that no one truly acts out of altruism, but now you seem to be claiming in addition that there are no mutually beneficial/positive-sum interactions between people.
@The Pachyderminator
Because you are currently no better than you have ever been nor will you be better in the future. Better/worse (good/bad) and illusions. You are no better nor worse than me nor anyone else.
No one could make you better even if they tried. They will no try because they have no interest (unless they, like me, realize trying would have no effect).
Every one wants to be better but no one can define it because it does not exist.
So wallowing in human excrement in a gutter is no different than spending the night at the Presidential Suite at the Four Seasons?
@Conrad Honcho
I have done neither so I cannot speak from specific experience. However, in my 71 years I have experienced many things. None was ever any better than another. None was qualitatively different than another. If you wish to challenge the idea you might start with defining better in any way that makes sense.
Ok, have you ever been kicked in the nuts or something with that same level of sharp – immediate onset pain? If no, please substitute down the intensity of unpleasantness until you find an event that works. If you’ve never had such a moment in 71 years, well, I don’t know what to say.
Compare the moment after you were kicked in the nuts to the moment immediately before. In one of those moments you’re suffering from intense pain, in the other you’re not. Maybe you’re aware intense pain is imminent, but you aren’t yet experiencing it.
Pick which moment you’d prefer to be in again; that moment is the better one. If your operational definition of “better” can’t distinguish between these two moments, your definition is needlessly obtuse.
@aftagley
Yes, I have had the experience referred to. As for defining better you are only talking in circles.
“something is better because it is preferred; we prefer things because they are better.”
What I prefer is what I do. Doing something does not make it better or worse. We just throw that part in to make ourselves important.
Better. adj. Consists of less wallowing in human excrement than an alternative.
There’s no circle – one moment has me writhing in ground in agony the other has me feeling completely normal. Looking at them independently I had a preference for one of them, which means there has to be some innate difference between the two, correct. A shorthand for describing both the difference and the resultant preference would be to call one of them better and the other worse.
Another example: imagine 2 weeks from now. Everything else is the same, but in one world you bought the winning lottery ticket and in the other you did not. One of these two futures now has you getting a significant infusion of money into your personal finances, the other has you remaining exactly the same. There is a difference between these two futures and most people would have a preference towards the future in which they have more money; thus one is better than the other.
So, I’ve demonstrated that external events (a foot travelling with high velocity to your nuts) can interfere in your life and make things worse or external events ( a check for some large amount of money) can interfere in your life and make things better… so…
Wait a second, you’re just going to claim that I don’t actually believe any of this and this is all just my attempt to pull status on you and you can’t change your mind because if you do it will be demonstrating weakness or some other BS, right?
Whelp, that’s a real negative external event.
@aftagley
That you had a preference for one means ONLY that you had a preference for one. No innate difference is required. Do you think there is an innate qualitative difference between two flavors of ice cream?
As for winning the lottery, if I won it, I would not claim it. I have no desire for the money. I am already doing what I want to do and can afford to do so. There is nothing innate about winning the lottery than makes it better than not winning.
@conrad honcho
Fails if you are a dungbeetle.
I was an atheist for my first 28 years. I often had trouble saying thanks, but feeling thankful tended to come easy. I think the feeling came down to considering and then appreciating, as fully as possible, the difference between not having something and having it.
@eric23 says:
I’ve warm feelings towards religion, mostly because I have warm feelings about believers, but intellectually I’m an atheist (but I’m not militant about it because I don’t want to be a buzzkill, and because I value happiness over “truth”), but emotionally I feel the desire to gave thanks out loud when things don’t go as badly as I feared they would, alternating “Thank you fate”, “Thank you God”, and (occasionally) “Thank you fortune”, though decades ago, at the mororcycle shop, a co-worker once told me “I didn’t know you were Catholic” and I told her I wasn’t, but me grandmother was, and she asked “Well, why did you just cross yourself?”, to which I replied “Um, I don’t know”, so I have some odd habits.
I’m curious–are you trying to name an emotion you yourself are feeling, or is this an intellectual exercise?
I’m not religious/spiritual, but I do sometimes feel an emotion that I guess could be called thankfulness? A sort of overwhelming happiness that the world is so beautiful and I have a place in it. I’m not sure if that’s “thankful”, but it does track more or less with what people who are religious talk about. I’m not sure if the name is all that important; emotions are fuzzy.
Somewhere in between maybe? I think that this is exactly the realm where we should be aiming for an intellectual formulation of emotions, while also checking that our intellectual ideas remain in accord with emotional experience. In short, not allowing the emotional and intellectual to disconnect from one another.
Personally, on this topic, I have the feeling that neither my emotions nor my thoughts are as clear as they could be.
Random covid-19 musings:
“Persistence of coronaviruses on inanimate surfaces…” is a good read. People misquote the max time for the virus to die, though: in the fridge it can actually last a month. “However, at 4°C persistence of TGEV and MHV can be increased to ≥ 28 days”. So just let your nonperishable deliveries sit for a week or so, but wash down your fridge food before you put it away.
Stanford, UW, FAANG companies and many more are going remote-work by default. Good on them! For me the big shift was when I stayed home a few days for a minor sniffle: it got me out of my rut and it suddenly seemed crazy to be taking public transit into work every day. So I recommend finding any excuse to either work from home or take a few days off. That might help take a better outside view on whether it makes sense for you to try hard to work from home.
Once someone has had it (and assuming that this actually does grant immunity for many months), they’ll have abilities that the uninfected won’t: they can care for the sick and are the best candidates for contact with the public (delivery drivers, cashiers, etc.). But you’ll also need to prove you’ve had it. But this is much harder if you can’t prove you’ve had it, so I was glad to see Gates-foundatoin sponsored home test kits on the horizon.
What industries will be affected? Schools, night clubs, day cares, nursing homes, travel, restaurants. Basically threatens our whole service and luxury based economy. These also are a big chunk of the low income jobs, and the folks who’ll have a harder time caring for kids sent home from school. So I’d expect huge ripple effects. People will have a hard time making rent. I’m expecting government to step in on things like evictions, even in red states. People are already complaining about “greedy” cruise lines not refunding tickets; I don’t think they appreciate how many of them are going to fold.
Daydreamed about writing a sci-fi story with an endemic disease like this that bifurcates a society into two groups: one that’s conscientious enough to avoid it — so they end up very socially isolated, and selecting for even higher conscientiousness over time, but are also fundamentally vulnerable since they’re uninfected. And a second group that doesn’t try to avoid it, reproduces their way out of it, and maybe evolves immunity in the long term.
Also, our situation seems like the biggest marshmallow test ever: sit at home for months avoiding fun things while your friends who had mild cases mock you for how it was “no big deal” and you should “get it over with”. Sitting at home sucks, but OTOH try thinking through your plans for what to do if your housemate (/spouse/child/etc.) gets it — now it’s a month of isolation in *one room* and a bunch of hassle and risk for people suiting up to bring you food. And then if you get bad enough, how do you get to the hospital? And then is it like, drop you off at the curb and call us if you make it? So that makes it easier to not eat the marshmallow and do the things that keep my risks near 0.
“The Word From Wuhan” made me laugh:
“With many workplaces also shut, notoriously absent Chinese fathers have been forced to stay home and entertain their children. Video clips of life under quarantine are trending on TikTok. Children were presumably glad to be off school – until, that is, an app called DingTalk was introduced. Students are meant to sign in and join their class for online lessons; teachers use the app to set homework. Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk’s rating plummeted overnight from 4.9 to 1.4. The app has had to beg for mercy on social media: ‘I’m only five years old myself, please don’t kill me.’”
This really made me chuckle, thanks for sharing and citing it. 🙂
@J,
I’ve received lots of e-mails from my employer
LankhmarThe City and County of San Francisco, that urges us:but I’m perplexed on what jobs may be done “remotely”, and if they may, why they exist at all.
I don’t know how widespread that e-mail is given out, but presumably it is all city employees. Anyone who works primarily with people or concepts could work from home for a time in an age of cell phones and internet.
Those who work with things can’t, but at least you’ll be around less people.
I have one. If you sit behind a desk and most of your work is being done at a computer, you don’t need to be in an office. Like, I write reports, process data and send emails. That just needs a good internet connection and maybe a work-laptop with some software pre-loaded on it.
Sure, physically being in the office helps with communication, makes it easy to catch people slacking off, and being in work clothes in a work place makes it easier to focus on work (he says, while at work and typing this) but at the end of the day I could do my job from the surface of the moon if the wifi was strong enough.
Everything that can be done on a Computer, can nowadays (and at least for 20 years now) be done from anywhere. Just like you can log on to your account here on SSC from anywhere with a internet connection, I can log into my company accout to do most of the stuff I do for a living, from anywhere with an internet connection and a decent monitor.
And why my job exists? Well, if you visited Europe anytime in the last decade there is a decent chance you used a service that was developed by the company I work for. So someone seems to value it.
@DarkTigger >
I wondered about City employees, as far as I know there’s no programmers on the payroll.
On reflection there is a class of people who’s job seems to be to go to meetings, which I guess may be done by video phones, but ultimately I’m not sure what those jobs are for.
I’ve never been overseas (unless crossing the bridge or tunnel to go to Alameda counts), and this last decade I’ve traveled more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) less than half a dozen times, but my brother stayed a year in Europe about 14 years ago.
There are almost certainly programmers on the city payroll. You probably have some sort of intraweb site for managers to log in and share budget reports or something. These are not complicated programs that are probably done in-house because it’s not worth the effort of maintaining a contract for.
Basically anyone whose job involves sitting at a computer can probably do that job from their computer at home, too. I will frequently log in to my office desktop from home when there’s a good reason not to come into the office. If my workplace goes quarantine I’ll still be able to do my job.
ETA:
For an obvious example, you understand someone has to make the city budget, right? This job is done via computers and phones (and meetings which could be done over computer and phone instead of face to face if need be). No one reports to the Old Budget Mine with a pick axe and mines up…budgets. You agree that having a city budget so the city knows what it can and cannot spend money on is good, right? There you go. There are lots of jobs like that.
My mother was a teacher and she literally did a third of her job at home.
It’s not only programmers, every job that happens behind a desk and does not involve regularly handing stuff to customers (e.g. accouting, planning, data entry) can be done anywhere.
Certainly you’re out of luck if you’re a plumber; you have to go where the pipes are (or need to be). But there are certainly people who take in complaints from the field, write work orders, and dispatch plumbers. There are people who order plumbing supplies and negotiate with suppliers. And the same goes for many other tasks which are themselves hands-on. For instance, your district attorneys may have to go to court, but their paralegals may be able to do legal research from home now that everything’s computerized.
So is the rule that if you deal with ones and zeros, you’re fine to work remotely, but if you deal with number ones and twos, you can’t?
America’s four hero-presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt) are carved into a mountainside in South Dakota. Unfortunately, they’re all a bit long in the tooth by now. Roosevelt’s term of office was more than a century ago. Time for an update.
If we are going to add a fifth president to the Mount Rushmore monument, which president should it be?
I don’t think it’s a good idea to nominate anyone from after, say, 1970 for political reasons. And there aren’t many good candidates from the postwar period — the only president 1946-1970 with a really good reputation is JFK, and his reputation is basically thanks to his martyrdom.
That means there’s really only one candidate: FDR. I’m not especially happy about that, since he’s about the closest thing we’ve ever had to a dictator and there are parts of the New Deal I’m not a great fan of, but all the other options are worse.
How about Eisenhower?
Sending the 101st Airborne to enforce an unpopular, undemocratic law-like object made up out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court, on a topic over which the Federal government had no authority, isn’t really a recommendation.
The Equal Protection Clause is a bit more than a “law-like object.”
Looking back from 2020 his actions sure seem like they were on the right side of history. It seems like you think putting the weight of the federal government behind desegregating schools was somehow a bad thing?
Looking back from 2020 his actions sure seem like they were on the right side of history.
I have no opinions on, because no knowledge of, Eisenhower. I do have opinions on history.
History doesn’t have sides (either “right” or “wrong”), top, bottom or pockets in its trousers/skirts. History is a record, all too often partial, biased, slanted or with whacking great holes in because nobody bothered to write the stuff down or they did it in a language nobody now alive can read, of what happened when where by who, as best we can piece together.
History can be “wrong” when something we think we knew turns out not to be so, or new evidence comes along, or a convincing counter-argument in interpretating the data is made. History is neither “right” nor “wrong” (any more than science is) when it comes to ethics or morals. Was X wrong to fight the Battle of Binlids? We can say “yes, because X lost and wrecked his kingdom” or “no, because X stopped the loss of the sardine mines by winning this battle”. History cannot say that “X was wrong because fighting involves killing and killing is bad” because even if that is true, X still fought that battle. Any conclusions about right, wrong, up, down, backwards, forwards or inside-out are nothing to do with history.
Thank you. I now return you to our regularly scheduled rows over the Burning of the Library of Alexandria.
“The right side of history” generally means that we judge them favorable using standards of our day.
Inasmuch as you think moral change is not been universally progress, you might not find the phrase entirely apt.
“The right side of history” generally means that we judge them favorable using standards of our day.
Which again has nothing to do with history as such, it has to do with social trends and fashions. In two hundred years (if the coronavirus does not eat us all and cause the downfall of civilisation) let us suppose that “the standards of the day” have turned against (picking at random) marriage for anyone, gay straight mono or poly. Has history continued on to the “right” side or has it gone “wrong”?
It’s neither, of course; speaking of the “right side” of history is as fallacious as speaking of the “end purpose” or “aim” of evolution. We have moved on from the neat linear Victorian model of evolution ending necessarily, after going from step to step of greater complexity, with Humanity at the apex. Now we prefer a branching, tree-like model where there isn’t any planning or purpose or language of that kind to be used.
Same with history – there is no neat rainbow-like arc bending always in the “right” direction, it’s more like a bowl of spaghetti. Discussing moral change or progress is a different matter. “The right side of history” makes us sound like (a) history is the neat ladder of progression like the early model of evolution (b) we know our rung on the ladder and what the ‘right’ thing at any specific time is and history is always moving in the ‘right/good/nice’ direction.
History is what happens. Good, bad and mixed. Progress, regress, stagnation. It’s not a moral judgement, that comes in at a different place with a different discipline. Look at the convulsions over the American Founding Fathers: is Thomas Jefferson on the right/wrong/no side of history? He used to be on the ‘right’ side, now he’s on the ‘wrong’ side and next decade/century? Who knows? The preceding generations of Americans who thought him a hero – are they villains or saints or just ordinary people? “Right” or “wrong” sides should have no place when talking about history as history, it’s just a way of letting smug people pat themselves on the back for being so clever and righteous as to ensure they were born at the ‘right’ point in time.
I’m not sure President Eisenhower did enough flashy things to get on a mountain, although if you add his time as a general that would probably be enough.
But Norn, that would mean we’d have officially declared 40% of our Hero Presidents, those whose faces will endure like the Pyramids, to be Roosevelts. Wouldn’t that just motivate every shrewd political operator to train their daughters from birth to run for President and make them marry the nearest convenient Roosevelt?
George Bush, but we’ll leave it ambiguous as to which one, just to mess with people.
How would you carve that? One half of the face is modeled after HW and the other modeled after W, like Two-Face?
No need; W looks quite a bit like his father, so I’m sure our sculptor could make it suitably ambigious.
Sounds like a waste of money we could spend on more useful Mount-Rushmore-related projects.
I propose we put real glass lenses in Teddy’s spectacles and install YAL-1 iodine lasers behind the eyes, to defend against incoming ICBMs.
We resign ourselves to the fact that any possible modern pick will be politically controversial. Choose Nixon, but with devil horns and a giant sharpie used to draw on a moustache.
Yes! Now there’s something that would draw attention to Mount Rushmore and get more visitors. Better yet, maybe we should carve a whole set of American villains as examples to avoid. OF course choosing which ones would be as political as choosing the heroes, but would get visitors.
No, have Jackson, Willson, Booth… idk Giteau? carved out of Basalt in North Dakota.
Have two separate mountains, one for heroes and one for villains. And don’t tell anybody which is which.
For a fun time, in your search engine of choice enter the words “[former president’s first and last name, with middle initial if necessary] legacy foundation” for any former president you’re curious about. I don’t think any former presidents’ names fail to return a result for a legacy foundation, with the possible exception of Obama whose foundation appears to be more about community service than perpetuating his legacy (for now).
If a fifth face was to be added to Mt. Rushmore and we were betting on whose it would be, the smart money might be on Reagan because as far as I am aware his legacy foundation is the best-funded and most accomplished. They might therefore be most likely to influence the committee in charge of the monument.
Probably JFK, since people seem to credit him with great things although apart from the moon landing they don’t go into much detail about what those are.
Were you thinking of:
https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1464647728l/30321491._SY475_.jpg
@johan_larson,
Roosevelt’s nephew Roosevelt is probably too controversial, so I’d go with Truman, then ten to twenty years later add Eisenhower, after that wait fifty years and then add another one, repeat until the mountain top Presidents reach Canada.
Giant statues are played out. Let’s do musicals instead. LBJ would provide plenty of good material as a tragically flawed leader of the Shakespearean variety. Lots of people die in the end.
The song “The Biggest Thing Your Ever Saw” will be the hit of the season.
If the US right-wingers get to choose, they carve Reagan into the side of Mount Rushmore. If the US left-wingers get to choose, who do they pick? FDR? Kennedy?
Is there some other substantial faction that would pick anyone else?
Obama’s still popular on the left.
Truman. The containment policy, the Marshal plan, the Berlin airlift, the UN and Nato, the desegregation of the military, the foundation of Israel. He cast a long shadow, and people on both sides of the political spectrum can find things to like.
I’ve been keeping notes on corona virus risk reduction tactics and turned some of them into a webpage to share with my family and friends. The idea to to make them as quickly actionable/understandable as possible. This is the pretty version, and you can contribute here.
1. Are any of these tactics harmful/ineffective?
2. Am am missing anything high-value/low-cost?
This is something my wife and I have done for years now with taking kids (or ourselves) to the doctor, that seems useful and maybe something that makes sense for avoiding COVID-19:
a. Immediately after leaving the doctors’ office, everyone uses hand sanitizer.
b. When we get home, everyone takes off their shoes as soon as they come in.
c. Everyone strips off the outer layer of clothes they were wearing at the doctor’s office. Ideally, we just put the clothes straight into the washing machine.
d. The people who went to the doctor’s office take showers pretty soon. (This is probably less critical than the others.)
All these measures work well for going out to a potentially-infectious place, like the grocery store or pharmacy. IMO, one way you’re likely to bring COVID-19 home with you is to get it on your hands/shoes/clothes from touching some other thing a sick person touched, or walking through a cloud of their droplets. (Or to get infected, but I assume you’re already staying 6 ft away from coughing/sneezing people, not touching your face, and washing/sanitizing your hands pretty often, so hopefully you can avoid that.)
Right now, I have my kids hand sanitize every time they/we get into the car after going to a public place. This is a low-cost, low-impact way to decrease our risk a bit.
I think your main goal is to keep COVID-19 out of your house–once one family member has it, it will be hard to prevent the spread to the rest of the family. To the extent that’s workable, I’d use a HEPA air purifier in their room, isolate one bathroom for mainly their use, and keep them separate from everyone else as much as possible. But really, if you’re taking care of a sick kid and washing his laundry and dishes, it’s going to be very hard to avoid catching the virus yourself.
[ETA]
The other stuff to do involves limiting public exposure–driving instead of taking the train, not going to concerts or restaurants, etc. I’d reschedule any nonessential doctors’ appointments to any general practice doctor until after the outbreak is either over or ubiquitous and unavoidable–going to your cardiologist isn’t so risky, but you don’t want to take your kid to the pediatrician for a check up next week.
A lot of the precautions you talked about were about stopping spread in your house (wiping things down with sanitizer)–this isn’t a terrible idea, but I think once the virus is inside your house it’s hard to prevent its spread.
I think the copper tape idea is worse than useless–copper is good at killing stuff, but I worry that the tape will make lots and lots of extra surface area for crud to hide. And I’m not sure copper will help if the thing stuck on it is, say, a tiny glob of mucus with some viruses spread throughout it.
What is sufficient to disinfect doorknobs? Is wiping for 10 seconds or so with a clorox wipe going to do it?
I wonder about the wooden bannister everyone holds onto going up and down the stairs. Same thing? Is there any prep work I can do ahead of time, like using Pledge, to make the viruses less likely to hold?
What are they made out of?
The doorknobs? They nearly all look like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Kwikset-Tylo-Polished-Brass-Bed-Bath-Door-Knob-300T-3-6AL-RCS-V1/304219870
So I guess brass, but that’s just what they look like. I see that description talks about their anti-microbial properties, but I’m not sure my 20-year-old house necessarily has that.
The anti-microbial properties come from the brass.
Get some Brasso and make it shiny. (idk how well that kills viruses)
Older is better. More likely to be actual brass. Just make sure that there isn’t dirt or debris caked on them and you’re good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_surface#Touch_surfaces
I bought nitrile gloves, and while waiting for the chance to use them I wondered just what the benefit was.
If I touch something contaminated, the virus is now on my gloves instead of my hands. For my purposes, it probably lives just as long on both. (Or does nitrile kill things in a matter on minutes?)
It saves me a hand-washing (but I have a *LOT* of soap, and did before I heard of Corona). The biggest benefit is that it might make me pay more attention to the things I am touching with my hands.
Gloves are for working with known contaminants and are discarded immediately after you are finished with the contact–and removed in such a way that the outside doesn’t ever touch your skin, clothes, door knobs, etc.
I doubt there is much benefit to using them constantly.
So I should hold off on the gloves until I am, say, interacting directly with someone who I know is sick?
Sorry if this sounds dense, but I’m trying to come up with threat models for how this stuff acts.
Sorry, I shouldn’t really talk about this stuff at all, I’m not well informed on any Corona particulars. I just wear gloves a lot and recently had training on handling blood-borne pathogens, the relevant part of which consisted of “put on gloves when about to handle contaminated material, then throw them away with that material, double bag the hazardous waste and throw it out immediately.”
But unless they’re labeled “disinfecting gloves” or something, like you say having them on in the wild is just going to spread it around about as well as your bare hands would.
That’s fine, your experience is much more than mine.
It sounds like gloves are for things that are dangerous to your hands, and you don’t want to stick your hands into blood because our hands are full of little cuts and scratches. Which is (probably) not the case for corona virus.
So should I put the gloves on immediately before touching my face, or should I wear them all the time and only take them off when I touch my face?
I think this is a joke, but my admittedly ill-informed advice would be that if your gloves came into contact with potentially hazardous materials, just take them off and throw them out and then wash your hands with soap. Then touch away.
If your hands came into contact with hazardous materials, never mind the gloves, just go wash them with soap.
It was a joke, but thank you for the sensible advice.
This comment will probably reveal who I am to anyone paying much attention, but the point of using a throwaway is to try to keep a gap between my usual username and this much information, at least to searchbots. Therefore, I’m requesting that people please refrain from referencing the contents of this post when talking about me in the future and please avoid referencing me in connection to this post.
I’m currently deciding between PhD programs in mechanical engineering. The area I want to do research in is pretty closely tied to another discipline, and is a fairly niche subfield of mechanical engineering such that several big-name schools don’t really have people who work on this sort of thing. The applications are actually pretty legit, it’s simply not something that’s the subject of a ton of academic research compared to, say, CFD or materials-related work. Work in this subfield is definitely being actively done by private companies, and I have a feeling that as technology progresses the problems it seeks to solve are going to become more important limiting factors for performance. While I don’t think it’s going to reach the level of relevance and research activity of CFD, I think that there are real implications for the work, and I expect this subfield to grow in the near future.
I’ve basically narrowed my choice to MIT or another school, not so highly ranked in ME in general but still within the top ~15 mechanical engineering schools. However, it’s top 3 in the discipline my subfield is adjacent to (as is MIT), and when I visited I really enjoyed the environment and my prospective advisor. The school and students (in private, informal conversations) consistently gave me the impression that students are treated well, set up for success, and that the advisor I’m talking to is very good at helping their grad students. They aren’t cited very widely, but nobody working in this subfield is, and they’re comparable to their contemporaries. I really enjoy the city the place is in, Boston being a bit too big for my taste, and the students seem happy. However, I’m worried about the possibility of finding a faculty job down the road. As far as I can tell, name brand carries a decent amount of weight in academic hiring, and I’m worried that the low prestige of the institution as a mechE school as compared to MIT is going to kneecap me in the future. MIT has also canceled its visit weekend due to virus fears, and I won’t have the chance to talk to the graduate students there about their experience. I will note that MIT has consistently given me the impression that it feels that it doesn’t have to do much of anything for its students simply because its reputation allows it to do whatever it wants, and I’m nervous about being fucked over by that. I am planning to reach out to graduate students when the school contacts us about what it’ll be doing instead of visit weekend, but I don’t think that it’ll change much about the question I’m currently asking.
Which, speaking of, is: does anyone have any advice for me on how I should be thinking about this decision? Some people I’ve spoken to have advised me to go with the bird in the hand vs the one and a quarter in the bush. Others have given me conflicting answers about the relative importance of ranking, fit, institutional support, and environment. I find myself without enough information to make the decision the way I want, and am asking for help constructing a way to make it with the information I do have.
How wedded are you to academia, as opposed to using your doctorate to get a career in corporate R&D?
Mech Eng seems to be a field where you can become a prof at a later date, anyway. Many of my lecturers started off in the private sector.
Agreed on the nature of ME – aside from Industrial, it seems like one of the fields in which movement between academia and industry is most fluid. I would be open to corporate R&D, but I fear becoming bored.
The future is not as important as you think it is. There is too much future to control. You will be fine in the future so just make the choice that is best for you now. This appears to be the non-MIT alternative.
But it’s very fun to think about.
I had no idea how competitive academic jobs are; my friend did a CS (machine learning, even) Ph.D at a top school and a postdoc at MIT and still said it was almost impossible to get a post at a good university. So if a professorship is what you really want, MIT is probably where you should be, and you should be cranking out cited papers in top journals ASAP.
Suppose all I care about is having as much time to do research that I find personally interesting as possible. Which is a better path: Early retirement or tenure?
I suspect the answer is try to get a high paying industry job and then retire early.
My understanding is that it is really hard to get tenure, and for every tenured professor, there are a hundred
slavesassociate professors vying for their spot.Technology is moving so much stuff from ‘needs $10^4 worth of equipment’ to ‘can be jury-rigged up by a committed hobbyist’ to ‘I was bored so I bought a $30 software-defined radio to listen to aircraft transponders’. It’s great.
There’s folks on Youtube making transgenic yeasts and lasers and simulated Mars bases for fun/ patreon money.
@Reasoner
Perhaps keep your options open? Work a well-paying R&D industry job that makes you suitable for a professor job. Then if professor spots open up because the current professors
die of the horrible virus that I plan to unleash upon the world and that will only kill old peopleretire, you can try to become a professor. Or you can retire early.I think that depends on how much it costs to do your research. If you need a whiteboard and a laptop with LaTeX and Sage installed to do your research, then retirement works fine. If you need grants to keep running a lab full of expensive equipment and animals and techs and grad students in order to carry out your research, retiring probably means losing access to that.
I’m coming from the humanities, so my advice may not transfer, but I would tell incoming students in my field that the most important consideration by far is the advisory relationship—a bad advisor can lead to years of misery, while a good one who’s a good fit will be the most formative professional relationship of your life. Of course you’re planning to talk to your prospective advisor and some graduate students, but I recommend honing in on your professor’s advisees, especially those who are in the final years of the program, and asking them blunt questions about how the process has gone for them and what their working relationships with faculty have been like. Personally, I think the university and department matter less than your relationships with your direct supervisors and coworkers, and the relationships they can help you build with other academics.
The second factor I would heavily weight is placement record. Where do people go—academia, industry, start-ups? More specifically, what’s the track record for graduates who worked with your advisor? In my department overall, for example, we have a similar (mediocre) placement record as other departments in the field, but for graduates in my sub-field—that is, students working with a certain three professors, two of whom are on my committee—we’ve placed almost everyone who’s graduated in the last ten years in tenure-track positions. Of course in engineering you probably aren’t worried about whether you’ll get a job afterward, but you might be able to get a better sense of how much hiring committees respect the university in question.
It sounds like either choice will likely be a good one—congratulations on the acceptances.
I am engineer, and while I don’t have a doctorate I work with several people who do, and I think every one of them would echo your advice. A good fit with your advisor, and an advisor that is not an asshole and actually cares about your career goals, is absolutely the most important thing. This person will dictate the quality of your experience and the direction of your future much more than the reputation of your grad school. I know multiple people who got burned (as in never completed their degree) or nearly burned because of self serving or generally crappy advisor.
Oddly enough MIT grads (undergrads are least) actually have a somewhat negative reputation in my department based on some bad past experiences – all very smart yes, but often poor team players, entitled striver types expecting to get the keys to the company on day one, and flight risks that bounced at the first opportunity. This is not to say all MIT grads are like this, just that at a certain level personal relationships matter a lot more than generic reputation, and I think this would be even more true at the doctorate level.
I feel attacked. I think I’m a good team player, at least, but the rest… yeah, if I’m going to be completely honest, let’s say it’s not exactly inaccurate.
That reminds me of the days of my youth, when I worked for an inevitably doomed software startup, at the height of the dot-com boom. Our office was based in Berkeley, and staffed mostly with Berkeley grads. But the main corporate office was in Boston, staffed with MIT grads. Sometimes they’d visit us, just to see how the other half lives.
In order to do our jobs, we needed to build a moderately simple object-relational mapping engine (this was before the days of NoSQL databases, and before libraries like Hibernate really took off). It was agreed that the Boston office would work on it, while we focused on other tasks in the meantime, and a month later we’d combine our efforts. We gave them some very detailed requirements for the engine. Most of our younger employees, including myself, started working on UI and other things. One veteran, who’d been there the longest, shook his head sadly and went to work on his own implementation, “just in case”.
In about a month, the Boston office produced a beautifully written and well-referenced white paper on why object-relational mapping is, in the general case, an unsolvable problem (though solutions for certain specific cases might be approximated). The veteran at our office produced a working version of an ORM engine. We ended up using it, and it worked quite well.
If your requirements said (or implied) “it must work in the general case”, the veteran didn’t produce something that meets your requirements. If your requirements didn’t, the Boston office didn’t produce a paper that addresses your requirements.
Our requirements said, “here are all the scenarios we will need to handle in order to produce our actual, non-theoretical software, that will be used by real, physical customers to do their actual jobs that they will pay us real money for”.
@ phdseeker
It might help others (and maybe me too, if I have any more comments) if you would elaborate on your plans after graduation. Definitely going to try for academia, or is industry a strong possibility?
*If* you are aiming for a faculty position when you graduate, then I’d suggest looking into the following.
1. Consider junior (assistant or recently-made associate) profs in your specific area of interest. Where did they get their PhD from? Less important, but still useful, where did they do their postdoc(s)?
2. Look at your potential advisors. Are they publishing in the top journals (or peer-reviewed conferences)? Are their regular coauthors top people in the field?
3. Where have former students of your potential advisors ended up working?
4. Those students who you’ve spoken to, what is their publication record like? The longer they’ve been there, the better.
Edited: Clarified my question.
I’m interested in academia because I’m just about done being bored in industry. I don’t have a very good sense of how relatively boring BigCorp research jobs are, and from what I hear that depends a lot on company size, but I’m open to it. Honestly, I’m not at all excited about grant-grubbing and tenure-scrabbling, but I also never want to file another ECO, so it’s probably a matter of picking the lesser evil.
In order:
1 – as far as I can tell, it’s not like people in this area are exclusively from tippy top schools. Not providing more of a detailed answer here, but MIT is more represented than this other school. This other place is not unrepresented.
2 – hard to tell, honestly. ME is such a wide field that “top journal” is a bit of a wobbly concept, and like I said, the subfield is small. Ref https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?area=2200&category=2210 and just look at the titles. They have all published in journals and conferences that seem highly ranked relative to other journals that would publish that work, but I’m not sure how much that means when there aren’t that many that would publish it.
3 – Everyone I’m looking at has sent students to a mix of academia and companies. Funny enough, but commensurate with what I said above about this being an area of industry research, each of them has produced at least one CTO. The MIT people have sent students to higher-ranked universities.
4 – Publication records seem pretty good for all of these, except one of the MIT lab’s student’s. I’ll have more information later this week on that.
@ phdseeker
A few follow-up comments based on your feedback in this thread.
Yes, creative freedom is a big appeal of academia. There are significant tradeoffs, but I believe it’s still worth it.
In many disciplines, this is not so wobbly, and I can’t tell if this is a potential issue for you. My concern is that faculty-search committees tend to bin people into areas when considering the nebulous issue of “fit”. Having publications in venues that are known to be top in your subfield is helpful to them. If there are no such cluster of venues, then other signals, like your PhD-granting institution, may become more important.
Not claiming otherwise, but I’d look carefully at those individuals who pulled it off. Were they publishing regularly at top places? If so, what was the research that bridged industry and academia? Where did they get their degree? What kind of position did they get in academia (tenure track?) and at what calibre of school? Some people can make this transition, but it seems tough, even if you’re doing R&D in industry.
Bottom line: I’d go with MIT. Write lots of papers with people who are both smart and kind, avoid jerks as much as possible, aim high with regards to publication venues, try to avoid marrying an aspiring academic
before you land your tenure-track position(semi-serious about this), etc. I wish you success!Thank you very much. I really appreciate the feedback! I’m probably not persuaded yet, but I’m definitely processing your advice.
My experience is from 20 years ago, getting a PhD in a hard science at MIT.
If you leave academia, the brand name will matter a great deal regardless of the actual rigor of the two programs – in the rest of the world ‘yeah, he got a PhD from MIT’ will get you in doors and give you immediate respect even if you did the same work at X (for an equally famous professor) that is a tier or two lower in mainstream prestige. Given your current plans you may put little value in this, but life can change, and you should consider the odds of making it in academia too.
In academia, in my experience, the highest odds of getting a tenure track position come from being a top student for a prestigious professor that has a track record of placing their students in tenure track positions, regardless of the mainstream prestige of the University the professor is at. But there are few of these professors (and the competition among their students can be intense.)
Beyond that, and beyond the obvious things – publishing high quality research in top journals (is this the thing in MechE?) – having several prestigious professors who are ready to give you strong recommendations when you apply for tenure track positions is also critical in my experience – having observed a few of these hiring cycles, the spreadsheet for the ~50 candidates that everyone looks at has columns with a brief blurb on their research, who they worked for, and the names of the 2-3 professors who wrote their recommendation letters, and those names really matter. Being at a place like MIT with lots of fame around gives you an initial leg up in developing the relationships that can lead to that, but your own networking (and the support your prof provides in making those connections) is a big driver too.
You mention being in a subfield that may be trending – I definitely remember that departments that were hiring were looking for candidates in specific hot subfields (to draw in grad students, funding, etc), so that matters as well.
This is part of what makes me hesitant about academia in the first place. The worst parts of it seem so… zero sum. Not what I want to sign up for at all.
If a professor has a track record of doing a ton of collaborations, within and without the department, the school, and academia. Would you call that a significant plus?
Indeed. Stick to the dark side of research at private corporations. We have cookies.
I can’t speak for academia, but as a hiring manager in industry, a degree from a state school with a top program in the particular discipline I’m hiring for counts as highly as a degree from MIT. We know who the top professors are, and we don’t care that they don’t teach at the most prestigious schools. So if you feel you’d learn more at not-MIT, or have a better experience while learning the same stuff, that’s where I would lean.
From my experience in computer science (as a grad student at MIT and
junior faculty at a pretty good school):
If you want to become a professor, MIT is very likely the better
choice. School reputation is distressingly important. Lots of people
will look at your file, and think of you as the ” candidate
from “. People in or adjacent ones may know that
is great at , but many people looking at your file
will be further afield and won’t know this. It’s hard to overcome
first impressions.
In CS, you basically cannot get a good job straight out of grad school
outside the top 4-5 places, so the other option is ( then
postdoc at top school). This option works OK, but I think it’s still
worse than grad school at a top place, for a couple reasons: first,
the latter gives you the option of a postdoc at a second top school if
you need it, and second, faculty are more invested in the success of
their students than their postdocs and will work harder to get them
opportunities and jobs.
That’s not to mention the effect on networking: academia can be pretty
incestuous, and the friends you make during grad school will be
influential on the rest of your career (reviewing your papers,
evaluating your grant applications, hiring your students, etc.).
[All this is pretty unfortunate for me! It’s pretty hard to convince
prospective grad students to come here over going to MIT, even if I’m
a better research fit.]
That said, the most important thing is that you do good research
during grad school. Grad school can be difficult and frustrating, and
keeping motivated is a vital part of success. So if you really
dislike Boston or don’t really like the prospective advisors at MIT,
going elsewhere may be better.
I have a physics PhD from MIT. I think it was a significant plus for quite some time to have that on my resume as opposed to a PhD from some less recognizable school. Most obviously, I got my first job by getting referred by a grad school friend who was not in my group, for example.
As everyone says, if you stay in academia, your advisor is really what matters. But many, many people who think they’re going to stay in academia do not, and there’s a good chance that you will be one of them. If you leave academia after grad school, having the MIT name will be useful since people outside of academia aren’t going to recognize the quality of your school. This is especially the case if there’s a chance that you’ll leave your field entirely and go into tech or finance or consulting or the like.
I don’t know about other fields, but MIT vs good state school is considerably less important if you want to be a software engineer.
Agreed. I don’t think I’m likely to go into finance or something like it, though – I don’t think my hear could take it. That is a factor I’m weighing, though – the value of the school name.
If getting a job in academia is important to you, you should go to MIT: regardless of environment, your network and personal prestige, as inflated by the prestige of your credentials, are far more important than going to a school that makes you feel good, even if it might have certain niche benefits to your learning.
On the other hand, private labs do most of the interesting work these days. I am inclined to advise pretty much anyone to avoid academia if they’re concerned with making an impact in their field.
I don’t know you and have no idea who you might be, so I leave it there.
I attend the Sacramento SSC meetup and thought I’d start doing short writeups on out meetings, both as advertisement and for sharing discussion topics with other groups.
Sacramento meetup report for 3/1/2020
Topics/Reading:
Vegan analysis of eating Oysters and Mussels.
Plants do respond to wounds damage: clickbait and wikipedia.
Should vegans eat oysters/mussels/shellfish?
Palladium Mag had an article and podcast on US and Chinese AI grand strategy
And Kelsey Pipper on why we don’t have self driving cars
Do we need a national strategy, is anyone worried about Chinese AI, and how serious are AI developments?
Ross Douthat redefines decadence
Peter Thiel at the Catholic First Things on decadence
And a review of Where’s my Flying Car, to contrast decadence with techno utopianism
Is decadence a thing?
Conversation:
We’ve got a solid group of ~6, so we spent an hour with everyone talking about new jobs and projects. I’m not sure when it happened but everybody has something cool they’re working on or they’re doing at work and it’s…just really nice. What it should be.
People liked the vegetarianism thing but the vegetarian didn’t take my troll bait so the conversation was kind of “huh, that’s interesting” and then moved on.
AI development was kind of a flop. Didn’t really generate any discussion.
Spent the majority the time on Decadence and Stagnation. It was disappointing however and felt like retreading old territory. It was mostly just relitigating Cowen’s The Great Stagnation without anyone having really changed their position. On reflection, I’m not sure Douthat’s decadence is adding anything beyond a cultural element but critiques of a modern vacuous culture are… just really old and decadence as a concept just felt like a remixing of two old debates.
If you want to come to one of our meetups, drop us a line @ stoodfarback@gmail.com.
I think you forgot the Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel links: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1476785244/ https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/back-to-the-future
I’ve read Ross’s book and am happy to talk about it with folks. On your criticism, I think first that you’re missing that his definition of decadence has four legs, not two: technological stagnation, cultural exhaustion, institutional sclerosis, and sterility. Second, Ross argues that we may well be decadent for a long time; climate change or political stalemate may bring the house down, but it’s far from a sure thing, something doomsayers rarely acknowledge. So he would say to e.g. Rod Dreher that most of the religious collapse we’ve seen in America is barely churched people becoming unchurched people, with numbers among evangelicals having stabilized, while Francis’s pontificate is much more a repeat of earlier fights, suggesting a cyclical trend.
I left them out, I was worried they might be a little too culture war-y.
Hey, if you wanna come visit we love new faces.
On institutional sclerosis and sterility, they just didn’t generate a lot of discussion. Sterility because people have two responses, either they care a lot or they don’t care at all. On institutional sclerosis, that trends too close to politics/culture war and we steer clear of that. Maybe the book is more than the sum of it’s parts.
It’s understandable that you steer clear of the subject because of politics but there should be room to talk about our institutional failures without going in to hyper-partisan mode. After all, it’s been happening for decades and continues regardless of who’s President or in Congress.
Sorry, but I live in Ohio, not Sacramento.
I understand if you wanted to avoid discussing the more politically fraught part, but there was clearly more to the book than what you said here.
I’ve been saying for a while that anything we might eat is going to harm other living organisms in ways that might be considered “causing suffering”. Therefore it would be more honest to say “I don’t eat meat because I feel bad eating something with a face” than a variation of “I don’t eat meat because it’s immoral to cause suffering”. Vegans most often say the latter though, so knowing there are apparently at least some vegans out there who acknowledge the way plants respond to damage makes me wonder if those vegans justify their veganism differently.
Do you actually believe plants responding to wounds damage means they feel pain, and are capable of suffering? Even if you do believe this, are you as certain that plants feel pain as you are that pigs feel pain?
Pain is a specific word that we really only understand in the context of our experience as vertebrates, or maybe as possessors of central nervous systems. Suffering is a less specific word that, to me at least, retains the proper meaning and significance with respect to a response to harm. I’m willing to agree to a different term if you don’t like “suffering” but for now that’s what I’ll use.
I believe plants can suffer, and certainly do when we harvest, prepare, and eat them. I don’t believe it follows from this that we shouldn’t eat plants, and so it also doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t eat animals. If we are trying to be honest then whatever ethical guideline governs what we may or may not eat should be something other than “does eating it cause it to suffer”?
I don’t think there’s anything shameful or ignoble in just admitting, for example, that you don’t want to eat things you think are cute because it makes you feel bad.
I’m also curious what the vegan reaction is to this line of thinking:
Within each of us is a whole ecosystem of microorganisms, and I don’t know but I’d guess it spans more than one kingdom of life. Just the act of our being alive means that countless numbers of other living things are being consumed and dying horrible deaths inside of us every moment. What is the moral action to take in this case? Is it more moral to die, so that at least this activity can take place in a setting not recognizable so much as “human with agency” but more as “passive decaying carcass”?
I don’t think there’s anything horrible at all in the death of a microbe, because I don’t think microbes have qualia. I don’t take the fact that an organism has some kind of defensive response to damage to be much evidence that it is capable of suffering in a morally relevant sense, any more than I would take the attractive or repulsive force between magnets as evidence that they “like” or “dislike” each other. The question of what entities should be considered moral patients is certainly a difficult one, but I’m pretty sure the answer is not “any homoeostatic system.”
Magnets aren’t living things. They haven’t passed through an evolutionary process with qualities intended to keep them alive and able to reproduce. I think that’s a key difference.
Agreed, but I am also pretty sure the answer is not (conveniently) “anything with a face, onto which we can project our own imaginings of its pain”.
The way I use “suffering”, it’s some sort of experience, and thus can only describe the state of things that have experiences. I think it is highly unlikely that plants have experiences–note that they don’t have anything resembling a brain. While they are alive in the biological sense, I think it takes more than energy use and self-replication to produce a conscious creature. I don’t think it’s correct to say that magnets suffer when you pull them apart, nor that a coffee table suffers when you smash it with an axe, nor that a tree suffers when you cut it down and turn it into a coffee table.
Plants do so much more than use energy and self-replicate though. They probe, they sense, they respond, and they communicate. But I also think there’s something about being alive, and running the evolved processes necessary to staying alive or passing on one’s life that necessarily contains behaviors indistinguishable (to me anyway) from an inherent aversion to damage. I read that as something like suffering.
@Well…
Sure, plants do a lot of interesting things. So does my smartphone. None of those things lead me to believe they have any sort of consciousness.
I don’t think responding to a stimulus alone signifies that the thing responding has an experience, partly because sometimes my own body responds to things unconsciously. Notably, when the doctor hits my knee with a rubber hammer. My ensuing kick is a response to that stimulus, but it isn’t a conscious decision. (The physiology backs up my subjective experience: the neural signals responsible for the reflex only go from my knee through my spinal cord down to my leg muscles, bypassing my brain entirely.) A plant turning toward the sun or releasing pheromones when damaged strikes me as more akin to my unconscious reflexes than my conscious pursuit of food and avoidance of pain, since plants don’t have brains. I think to suffer you’ve got to have some sort of internal model of the world and some sort of reinforcement learning going on to be sentient and experience suffering in a way that I care about.
That seems like an overly anthropomorphic definition of suffering. The same evolutionary time period that produced us also produced modern plants, so I have trouble believing they got this far with a level of ontological sophistication only equal to manmade machinery. Surely there is room for a kind of “experience” somewhere between that of a human and that of the phone in your pocket. In a slightly more cosmic sense, things that are alive have what I would regard as a will or a basic desired state toward which they strive (i.e. the state of remaining alive, of being able to pass on one’s genetic heritage, etc.), and suffering can be defined as the response to having that state obstructed in some extreme way, such as being eaten alive.
@Well…
The same evolutionary time scale also produced some pretty cool-looking rocks, but I don’t think that’s any evidence the rocks are sentient. For a closer example: How about viruses? Over evolutionary timescales, they’ve been incredibly “successful” at spreading throughout the populations of virtually every kind of organism. Yet a virus consists solely of a strand of DNA or RNA, and a handful of proteins that get that nucleic acid into a cell that can replicate it.
I think you’re the one anthropomorphizing here. Does a rock have a “will” to fall to the ground when dropped? Is being on the ground its “desired” state? Likewise for the virus: Natural selection has produced viruses which will replicate and spread themselves, but it would be odd to say that the handful of organic molecules with no information processing “wants” to replicate.
When you get up to a bacteria, you get behavior that looks more like some sort of decision-making (e.g. sustained high lactose and low glucose levels turn on the production of the protein that digests lactose). But this is still the kind of basic [if A and not B then do X] logic that I can simulate with a couple of differential equations in Matlab. It isn’t the kind of “update a model of the world and figure out how best to accomplish my goals” system that we use; bacteria don’t learn*.
The same goes for plants; the actions they take in response to stimuli look to me like hardcoded chemical responses, not like a conscious agent reacting to pain. It seems analogous to my blood clotting when i get a cut: A response to the injury, but distinct from the conscious pain.
*If I’m wrong about that, man, send me the paper! That’d be real cool if single cells had some sort of capacity to learn. But I doubt it since there’s only so much you can express with raised and lowered concentrations of a couple thousand proteins.
I think that proves too much. We could express the same idea about human brains.
We need a definition of consciousness in order to say what is and isn’t conscious, and… well, good luck.
Are there any arguments for why we should think that plants or bivalves can suffer, i.e. experience pain qualia, that wouldn’t also apply to humans under general anesthesia?
I’m hesitant to apply an anthropomorphic definition of suffering to plants or bivalves. We don’t know what it’s like to experience damage as one of those. But we can observe that they definitely respond to damage, and some aspects of their response are familiar.
Okay, but my body responds to damage when I’m under anesthesia during surgery. I don’t experience that as suffering, and I wouldn’t say that my other organs are suffering even if my brain isn’t, at least not in any morally relevant sense. I don’t think there is such a thing as “what it’s like to be my skin” being cut open while my brain is unconscious.
Sure, but it’s a tautology: there isn’t such a thing as “the conscious experience of my skin while my brain is unconscious” because your brain, and not your skin, is where your consciousness “happens”. “Being like” something is a brain thing.
You, earlier:
Also you:
Plants and bivalves don’t have brains, so …
I don’t see the point you’re making. Is it different from what I said?
By contrast, I’ve never understood the “plants suffer too” argument against veganism.
Outside of arguing with vegans, nobody values the suffering of plants the same as that of animals. Nobody is arguing for laws against plant abuse, or against using pesticides on your lawn (at least not out of sympathy for the weeds). So it would be very unusual to suddenly think plant suffering is equal to animal suffering only when asking which one to eat.
And even if we say plant suffering is equal to animal suffering, producing meat for food usually involves producing plants, then killing them and feeding them to an animal, then killing and eating the animal itself. So eating the plants directly still removes a lot of suffering from the equation, especially if (like many vegans) you believe it takes 10 calories of plant food to make one calorie of meat (not sure about the exact numbers).
So in any case if your staying point is “my food should feel as little suffering as possible”, veganism is correct regardless of how highly you value plants suffering. Of course there are other arguments against veganism.
It’s mostly trolling, honestly, but the steelman is that it explores edge cases that defy easy categorization and it’s fun to explore category boundaries.
As a general rule, vegans believe we shouldn’t eat animals since they feel pain. There’s a class of animals, however, which don’t have brains and probably don’t feel pain: shellfish are the most practical example but jellyfish would also fall into this category. Vegans might respond that shellfish respond to injury and try to avoid it as evidence that they do but plants also respond to injury in a variety of ways and we don’t accept that as evidence of pain. This leads into discussions, such as the one in the last adversarial collaboration, over whether fish feel pain. Where exactly this line gets drawn is interesting and has clear implications for people’s eating habits.
It also lets us poke fun at vegans because, since shellfish:
#1 don’t feel pain
#2 Filter and clean the water, instead of requiring fertilizer
#3 don’t involve the incidental death of rodents/varmints during harvest
are probably the most ethical food source available.
As someone who uses the “plants suffer too” argument against veganism, I can tell you flat out I don’t do it to troll. I do it to make the point that basing our dietary choices on notions of which organisms suffer or feel pain and which don’t is arbitrary at best and (to my eye anyway) dishonest at worst, and it would be better to simply say you don’t want to eat something because eating it makes you feel bad and leave it at that.
@well…
You can say “veganism is silly because we shouldn’t base our diets on whether or not we believe the organisms we eat experience suffering”. But to say “plants suffer too” implies that the organism’s suffering is relevant, and then it’s a bad argument because more plants will suffer / die for meat than die for a vegan diet.
Basically all multicellular life and much single-cell life preys upon other life. Plants prey upon each other, choke each other out, crowd out each other’s roots in a struggle for survival. There’s no “one weird trick” for getting around that fact if we are to feed ourselves and continue living, and accept our place as members of that class known as “living things.”
Existentialists are fond of saying that life is suffering, that this is the great tragedy of being. Another perhaps more horrifying side to this is that life is inextricably bound up with inflicting suffering as well.
Moral veganism strikes me as a story designed to allow people to simply pretend this isn’t true, that nature is some kind of fairytale utopia except for human meanies who could restore the utopia if only they’d quit eating those members of the kingdom animalia that happen to have faces.
The only ethical choice is suicide?
Unless we are doing a good thing by eating those murderous plants and animals, of course 😉
If we are going to claim that it is unethical to cause suffering by eating things that suffer when we eat them, then even if we starve ourselves to death the organisms that inhabited our internal microbiomes will suffer while we decompose!
>Another perhaps more horrifying side to this is that life is inextricably bound up with inflicting suffering as well.
I think this was Hitler’s philosophy. The guy wasn’t really into positive-sum games like multinational liberal democracy. Nor did he get that purchasing power came from industry, not Central European farmland.
I really honestly think plants probably feel some pain (not in exactly the same way we do, but in a way that a utilitarian ought to recognize). I’m pretty sympathetic to panpsychism, and believe in it more than in the competing philosophies of consciousness. I’d also be willing to believe that there is consciousness associated with some nonliving things.
But it doesn’t affect my life much since I have no idea what the moral implications for behavior actually would be. I’m not a vegetarian for example, though I do generally avoid chicken.
@Lambert:
I don’t see how Hitler is relevant, particularly since he was a vegetarian (at least in his later years).
I’m not saying the fact of life being inextricably bound up with both experiencing and inflicting suffering means we should aspire to inflict suffering or not care at all if we do; I’m saying that acting as if you can avoid this truth by not eating certain animals is naive at best and dishonest at worst. There are some good or at least unpretentious reasons to not eat certain animals, so you don’t need to make up reasons whose logic outreaches their own grasp.
But, in general, animals that people eat feel less pain than animals humans don’t eat. Ideally, they never endure hunger or thirst, are sheltered from the cold, treated for their diseases, never feel the tooth or claw of a predator, and at the end pass from life to death in a painless instant. The reality might not quite match that ideal, but we do usually try and we usually do more good than bad in that area. Alternately, we leave animals to live exactly as they would if we weren’t going to eat them, exactly what the vegans would have us do, except that instead of starving until one can no longer outrun a wolf and then being slowly torn apart by a wolf pack, we substitute a rifle bullet.
So, if there’s something objectionable about designating an animal as my next meal, I’m pretty sure “pain” isn’t it. The vegans need to think a bit more about what it is that they really object to, if they want me to take them seriously on this front. And avoid unjustified anthropomorphism while they are at it.
What about those vegans who think veganism is healthy, and don’t care about the moral aspect? IME, those are the two main groups – the “moral vegans” and the “health vegans”.
Also environmentalist vegans.
Yeah, I think “health vegans” and “environmentalist vegans” have a stronger epistemic leg to stand on.
I’ve tried to consistently refer to “moral vegans” in this thread but I might have left off the qualifying term in a few places.
HV? Marginally so. Veganism happens to be a pattern that overlaps to a large degree with habits that will promote metabolic health via reducing fat mass. Vegetarianism doesn’t provide any benefit when controlled for dietary quality, and I don’t expect veganism would either. But if eating this way and supplementing what’s missing is what keeps you from being an obese diabetic, I’m not going to argue, even if it’s suboptimal in my opinion.
EV? I don’t think they have a leg at all. Getting rid of our grass-based bioreactors would probably knock us back to the Malthusian age, given that most land is unsuitable for crops. And that’s not even considering how many people would be sentenced to micronutrient deficiency. It’d be the Neolithic Revolution all over again.
Another response is, “sweet, guess I get to eat clams!“
This is a Reductio ad Absurdum technique. The arguer does not actually believe that plants suffer. Rather, they are arguing against grounding diet in suffering reduction by attempting to show that it leads to an untenable conclusion.
It’s usually better to argue in the form of Proving Too Much when you Reductio ad Absurdum, (especially in a text format such as this) so that people will not mistakenly interpret that you earnestly believe the absurd position.
A few comments up I said outright that I believe plants suffer, though I qualify “suffer” to make clear that I don’t mean it in the typical anthropomorphic sense.
@Well…
Yes, the redefinition shold have been a tip off that you were ad absurding. Not as much of one as this though:
Ad absurdum is a lot like sarcasm. Without the body language and tonality to indicate that you are just saying a thing for the sake of argument, many interpreters will just assume what they want to assume about what you meant.
It should be easy to parse what I said without vocal tone or body language: that the simple act of existing as a living thing causes other living things to suffer.
I’ve elaborated earnestly on this in other comments quite a bit, so there isn’t really an excuse to interpret it creatively or assume I’m being sarcastic.
I bet there are people who do honestly believe this. I mean, millions apparently believe that the governments are secretly run by lizardmen – so why not that plants are equally entitled to protection against abuse as animals? Hell, I don’t believe in lizardmen, but do feel bad when I accidentally cause plants avoidable harm, at least when it pertains charismatic megaflora, like trees.
You can have this belief without the tree being able to suffer or it having rights.
I would feel bad if I hosed down the White Cliffs of Dover in crude oil. Not because they could feel it or that they have a right not to be. Rather I believe that one should not despoil nature on a whim. I apply the same standard to cutting down trees and abusing animals. It’s not that they have rights, it’s that I am obliged to not destroy things without a good reason.
I’m pretty sure there are certain Jainists who believe some version of this, and will only eat fallen fruit. I don’t know if they consider that “safe” or a concession, the minimal damage they can do and still survive.
There are a few people who honestly believe the suffering of plants matters, it’s one of the motivations for fruitarianism. My argument concerns people who say “plants suffer too, so you might as well eat meat” — that’s the bad argument I hear a lot.
@Kaitian:
I’ve never heard anyone say “Plants suffer too so you might as well eat meat.”
My argument has been this: Anything we do to nourish ourselves causes some kind of suffering to our cousins the other organisms, whether it’s plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc., and that’s something we have to accept. We are members of a group known as living things, and part of what living things do is prey on each other. That’s a horrible truth but it is the truth. Reducing suffering is a noble goal, but I don’t think not eating [those members of kingdom animalia that have faces] is going to get you there. If you want to not eat [members of kingdom animalia with faces] anyway, be honest about your reasons. I don’t eat cats and dogs, but I don’t pretend it’s because they have some objective quality that cows and pigs don’t.
@well…
To my ears, your argument does sound like “plants suffer too, so might as well eat meat”, or at least “suffering is unavoidable, so trying to minimize suffering is pointless”. It is a very old and very common position to believe that the production of plant food involves less suffering than the production of animal food, and that trying to minimize suffering is a noble goal. If none of the existing arguments to that effect convince you, I’m not going to convince you either, but I hope you understand that your position has some very unusual premises and is unlikely to be interesting to most advocates of veganism. Trying to cause less suffering is their honest goal, even if you disagree with that goal or their proposed method.
The difference between a cow and a cabbage is much more obvious than that between a pig and a dog. Things like oysters are edge cases that most vegans don’t think about, and most people rarely eat anyway.
I’d add onto this that reducing suffering to oneself is also of great import. I can understand willing sacrifice of one’s life and health for a cause, but I don’t think this cause is particularly worthy.
@Kaitian:
I know it is unusual to hear someone say “plants suffer too” but that is what I’ve said, and some version of that does seem to be supported by research. The difference between a cow and a cabbage may look huge from casual observation, but scientific findings suggest it isn’t as big as you think.
My original comment in this thread was in response to evidence that some vegans have considered the suffering of organisms without faces. I agree that trying to minimize suffering is a noble goal and I said as much, but as you summarized, I am not convinced that avoiding meat is an effective way to do it, not least because the edge cases show that what we count as meat and what we don’t is ultimately arbitrary.
Besides, I also dislike the way vegans seem to dishonestly represent their diet as one that eliminates suffering rather than one that merely reduces it somewhat. Not so much because dishonesty is impolite, but because it avoids confrontation with an uncomfortable truth of existence.
Raising animals typically requires more plant farming than raising plants directly for human consumption does. Those animals need to be fed a lot of plants to reach the point where their meat, milk, or eggs can be collected. If someone believed that plants experienced suffering, following a vegan diet would still reduce suffering more than following other diets would.
I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something about this kind of calculating that doesn’t sit right with me.
Besides, the number of plant organisms that have to be harvested to provide the same nutrition and calories as the equivalent in whatever animal product is going to be so huge it’s a wash anyway.
For me its the general inflexibility of the vegan position. Some animals can be fed on by products of plants humans eat or use in other ways, but you won’t find many vegans who would eat rabbit or will eat even a free range egg, fed on vegetable scraps, even if you promise that the chicken won’t be slaughtered after its laying days are done.
Actually thinking about it I really hate the implication. 1: Its wrong to profit off the suffering of other living beings. 2: We can only exist by profiting off the suffering of other living beings. The conclusion is that our existence is wrong, I’m minimizing my horribleness isn’t much comfort there.
Do you have a source on that last claim? I think it’s pretty implausible that it would be a wash. For what you’re proposing to be true, the typical vegan would have to eat so many more plants than the typical omnivore that the difference between them is as great as the sum total of all plants eaten by all the animals whose meat the omnivore is eating, plus some fraction of all the plants eaten by the animals whose milk and eggs the omnivore is eating. This proposed equivalence doesn’t seem consistent with the way that trophic levels work.
@Grantford: I was thinking of it in terms of thermodynamics. But you’re probably right that the energy transfer chain [plants –> animals –> human] is less efficient than [plants –> human] because the animals will burn as heat a lot of the energy they get from plants just so they can grow the products we consume from them. So maybe it isn’t a wash. But I still would confidently say the number of plants being consumed in either case is going to be huge.
(I also happen to think the processes we use in harvesting, preparing, and consuming plants inflict a lot more suffering on the plants than their counterparts for animals, for starters because we eat a lot of plants while they are still alive. But I haven’t thought about that as hard so it’s probably best left for a separate discussion.)
You can make the case that it’s better to cause suffering to only a million organisms rather than twenty million, but vegans seem to be claiming that through their lifestyle they are causing suffering to zero instead of a thousand.
@Well…: Yeah, a lot of plants are certainly consumed either way. Most or all of the vegans I know do not think that plants are capable of suffering, leaving only animal suffering to be taken into account in their decisions.
I don’t think most of the vegans in my friend group would claim that their lifestyle leads to zero suffering. For instance, they probably realize that some rodents and other small animals are killed by the large machinery used in harvesting and cultivating crops. However, I don’t know whether the vegans in my friend group are representative of vegans in general regarding that attitude.
I can’t speak for actual vegans because I am not one, but my thinking in this direction has a lot to do with the hypothetical of an advanced alien species finding earth, and that bit in Far Point where Q judges us by our own rules or some such. A moral philosophy thus tested that discourages the aliens from eating or otherwise mistreating us seems nice.
I’m surprised the EA/LW/SSC communities are relatively silent on the US primary at this point. It made more sense to me when there was a crowded stage and less traction. But Biden vs. Sanders is pretty stark, with a much more limited set of scenarios, allowing for more possibility to impact.
I don’t think we have a coherent opinion. Democratic socialism is bad, but leaving things the way they are is also bad. Nominating a senile candidate is bad, but nominating a candidate whose positions are really far from the average voter is also bad. I haven’t officially endorsed either Bernie or Biden and I’m genuinely unsure about who would be better. That makes it hard for it to be an EA cause.
“Democratic socialism is bad” is pretty odd statement to make when we’re basically talking about someone who is between New Deal Democrat and 1950s Republican. Sanders might avoid progressive capitalism adopted by his campaign co-chair Khanna and previous competitor Warren, but frankly that’s what he is. When Venezuela’s “right wing opposition leader” was asked about AOC he basically called her a moderate.
Sanders’ plan involves government spending of ~70% of GDP, significantly more than anything that exists in Europe right now. For comparison, Corbyn’s plan would involve spending ~45% of GDP and he’s seen as comically extreme, and got the worst result for Labour since 1935.
I can assure you neither New Deal Democrats nor 1950s Republicans would support anything even remotely like it.
Corbyn lost badly in terms of seats, but the shift in total number of votes wasn’t that big.
First past the post messes up English parliament elections just as much as the American electoral college.
(And I say that as someone who doesn’t like Corbyn’s policies.)
Regarding comparisons between Bernie and Corbyn, one thing worth bearing in mind is that (at least this is my impression from afar) in the UK, voting for a PM means voting for the actual implementation of that PM’s party’s platform, to a far greater extent than voting for president in the US. (Maybe especially compared to the US primary race? I don’t have a sense of how much the primary winner determines the party platform versus other party leaders, so maybe Bernie’s hypothetical general election platform would already be watered down compared to what it is now?)
Anyway, US presidential candidates promise the moon, but we can reasonably expect that whatever policy changes would actually be enacted would be much less dramatic, once congress and SCOTUS have had their say. I think this is especially likely for a more radical candidate such as Bernie.
I don’t think it’s so much the part leaders that have been stopping policies getting through in recent years so much as backbenchers.
But now the Tories have a strong majority and Boris isn’t afraid to get rid of the likes of Javid.
Corbyn’s been challenged aplenty by party moderates and always seemed to come out on top. His party is plenty willing to rid him of turbulent MPs by deselection (so they can’t run for Labour in the next election).
So BoJo personally wields a lot of power, just as Corbyn would have had he got a majority.
Src?
I’m guessing the source was this, which was linked elsewhere in the thread.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/02/rooftops.html
Right, in which case the question is why we should favour that estimate from someone who is clearly not a disinterested truth-seeker rather than other lower estimates, such as this (hardly glowing) report from the Atlantic.
Also note that it is incorrect to paint Corbyn’s 45% as outlandish — that’s almost exactly the EU average. If he is seen as “comically extreme” on that basis then that tells you something about the people doing the seeing, not him.
The New Deal wasn’t exactly a good idea.
Please just own it. The guy is farther left then Jeremy Corbyn by a good deal.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/02/rooftops.html
@adgold,
Sanders seems more Left to me now than he did to me in 2016.
If you want to discuss it with me more, please post at 148.75 with @Plumber in your comments, or ask again in 149.25
Sanders has some policies that are in line with European welfare states (government funded health and education) but also some that go way beyond it – like an 8% wealth tax on the super rich, and cancelling student debt. Wealth tax exists in a few other countries, but at rates roughly one tenth of what Sanders wants, and I can’t imagine how a rate that high would almost immediately devastate ownership of corporations. College-educated Americans are the most privileged class in the world, sure some people may be unable to get a good job even so, but average debt seems to be about USD 35K, and the increase in expected lifetime earnings from having a degree is 900K. It is really, really hard for me to see why cancelling this debt is a reasonable use of taxpayer money, or why it would be supported by the working class or the (actual, not just didn’t-get-my-dream-job-right-after-college) poor.
On a more personal view, he is a left-wing populist whose solution to any problem seems to be to take from the rich and sprinkle indiscriminately over any superficially good cause. I am in favor of redistribution of income, but I’m too old and too much of a technocrat to buy into that kind of “solution”.
As I understand it, most countries in Europe don’t have a lot of student debt in the first place–they’ve kept the notion that public universities shouldn’t cost all that much, where we decided that public universities that were once almost free for state residents with good grades should now cost tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend.
By my count, exactly 52 people would be affected by the 8% wealth tax.
@thisheavenlyconjugation
How much revenue would be aquired by the tax, if said 8 people would actually pay up?
IMO, this potentially hinges on how exactly you treat the “partial college” demographic. I’ve met plenty of “working class” service industry no prospects for better type people who have five figures of college debt… from multiple attempts at college followed by dropping/flunking out, re-trying again a few years later, etc.
Are these people going to get their debts forgiven as well? So long as they think they might, they’ll definitely vote for it.
And the truly poor don’t pay much federal tax at all, already – so what have they got to lose? They probably assume that debt forgiveness is also tied in with some scheme to make college generally cheaper/more affordable for them/their kids as well.
The tax in general affects more than 52 people. I’m talking about the highest 8% marginal rate on wealth of over $10 billion.
Note I’m not expressing any opinions about the tax in general. My point is just that the marginal rate of 8% seems unlikely to have much of an effect unless you think there will major consequences from taxing Bezos’ wealth at 8% rather than 3% (the rate that would be applied to single-billionaires).
@thisheavenlyconjugation
I doubt 8% of Jeff Bezos’s net worth is in liquid assets and I can easily see him liquidating 8% of his Amazon shares as being pretty damn disruptive. That said, the real problem with a wealth tax is assessing someone’s wealth. Forbes’s numbers are just for fun and they know it.
@Jake R
But would it be significantly more disruptive than liquidating 3% of it? If not, then Ketil should have been talking about the 3% that will impact less trivial numbers of people.
Also, note that we do have an example of almost exactly 8% of Bezos’ wealth being suddenly redistributed (and that he would pay less than 8% under the wealth tax because it’s a marginal rate).
It would be fewer than 52 a year or two later, when they’d reorganized their finances to avoid the tax.
“Democratic socialism is bad” is pretty odd statement to make when we’re basically talking about someone who is between New Deal Democrat and 1950s Republican.
It does amuse me to hear Sanders spoken of in such terms of flaming firebrand Leftiness; our current guy was, in terms of political activism, never done flying out to South America and being a flaming firebrand Leftist, and nowadays he’s most famous in office for his dogs 🙂
@Deiseach >
Oh, Higgins does seem Sanders-ish!
Very ’80’s Lefty!
FWLIW, as I remember it, rarely I’d encounter such old men (in retrospect often younger than I am now), peddling their different splinter faction newspapers (it often seemed that they were all a “Party of one” with printing presses, lurking around school and downtown along with the Moonies and Hair Krishnas, but almost never such that were old woman, but young women of such idealism/lunacy I did indeed meet – including one (Jane G. IIRC), who disappeared for some weeks, and came back saying she’d been to Nicaragua digging wells of something, she’s probably a school teacher now if she followed the path of most of the girls I knew them.
Definitely back then boys were often anarchists (they’d say, which mostly meant they didn’t want “the man” to stop them from skateboarding), but the girls of the ’80’s sometimes went hard left, then again the girls seemed usually more extreme in many ways (drinking, smoking, whatever), yet it was the girls who more often later became middle-class.
Probably a pattern why, but I can’t suss it.
@Scott Alexander
Could you taboo the word “socialist” for a moment, and describe an example the type of Sanders’s policies that would disincline you from supporting him?
Past interactions suggest that you use the word “socialism” in a somewhat anachronistic way, e.g. not related to state ownership of the means of production. So I’m not sure what you mean by it here, and the term tends to obscure more than illuminate.
I recall your vigorous support of the UBI a few years ago- a state run wealth redistribution program funded via taxation. So unless you have changed your mind on this, surely it can’t be simply the increases in taxes/welfare that turns you off?
Is it his Medicare for All plan? The Green New Deal? The free college?
Not Scott but… Good God, yes. It says something that banning private health insurance is the most reasonable proposal on that list.
@Le Maistre Chat ,
Debt forgiveness schemes bug me (unless they come out of the pockets of college chancellors, presidents, chief hospital administrators, and basketball and football coaches) but public colleges
were free for my Mom’s generation of Californians again, so making that status quo again isn’t unprecedented.
@Plumber: I didn’t know until the time before this you mentioned it, but yes, California law made UC tuition free to Boomers. Here’s why I’m skeptical that would work again:
1) Bernie Sanders is proposing a new federal law, not putting an old state law back on the books. It’s possible to empirically demonstrate that old thing worked, but new thing is likely to be so different from the old that it doesn’t. What we need here is a reactionary governor of California, not a left-wing POTUS.
2) I suspect they were more selective of high school graduates than Bernie wants universities to be. “Free college for state residents who maintained a 4.0 GPA” is very different economically from “Free college for everyone!”
3) What was the state of Cost Disease in universities when free college ended in California? Even putting the old law back on the books could be an economic disaster if the number of
human cost diseasesadministrators has made the amount of money the government must transfer from its tax coffers to the university 10x or 100x as much per student.I could go on.
@Le Maistre Chat wrote: “I didn’t know until the time before this you mentioned it, but yes, California law made UC tuition free to Boomers. Here’s why I’m skeptical that would work again:
1) Bernie Sanders is proposing a new federal law, not putting an old state law back on the books…”
There does seem to be a tendency to nationalize everything, my understanding is that the Canadians did their medical care system Province by Province, exactly why California didn’t do Romneycare/Obamacare on its own like Massachusetts did, I’m not sure, maybe because it used to be harder for California to raise taxes.
“I suspect they were more selective of high school graduates than Bernie wants universities to be. “Free college for state residents who maintained a 4.0 GPA” is very different economically from “Free college for everyone!””
Community colleges were free then as well, and in some ways that hurt my Dad, as in my aunts tale he banged his head against the wall trying for years (before I was born) trying to get enough credits to transfer and learn to be a pharmacist, which he never did, becoming instead a roofer, mason, and finally the guy who holds the ‘stop’ and “slow” signs for in the road work. My uncle never tried college, he did a plumbing apprenticeship instead, and faired better financially. My Mom though did transfer to U.C., got a diploma, and later a job as an “administrative assistant’ at U.C. after she divorced my Dad.
“What was the state of Cost Disease in universities when free college ended in California? Even putting the old law back on the books could be an economic disaster if the number of human cost diseases administrators has made the amount of money the government must transfer from its tax coffers to the university 10x or 100x as much per student…”
I’ve read that in most States they highest paid public employees are college basketball and football coaches, and the next highest are university hospital administrators.
For what it’s worth, Georgia has “nearly free state college for state residents with a 3.7+ GPA” (funded by the state lottery).
@Loriot: Thanks for the data point.
Florida has a similar thing with its Bright Futures scholarships: A 3.5 high school GPA (in the specified courses) gets you 100% of your (in-state, public) college tuition covered (as long as your college GPA stays above 3.0); a 3.0 high school GPA gets you 75% (as long as your college GPA stays above 2.75).
(Hopefully this is enough non-CW for an open thread)
I really don’t see how free college is supposed to make sense. Based on Scott and other’s posts here, a large part of the problem seems to be that college is largely a signalling spiral and the reason it got so expensive is because it is being heavily subsidized and heavily promoted. Making it free would just throw oil onto the fire. There’s also the issue that it is a giant handout that largely benefits the upper middle class, which seems odd from a political perspective.
I’m not sure what level of involvement Scott has with the financial side of his psychiatry practice (I seem to recall he works for someone else’s office?) but I would suggest he contact the billing people (is the office big enough to have a business analyst?) and get
1) His payor mix (what % of patients are medicare/medicaid/commercial insurance)
2) The reimbursement amounts for the top 5-10 CPT codes he bills (maybe the 9083x codes for psychotherapy?) for medicare, medicaid, and the top commercial payors. Note, this may be slightly more difficult for Medicare as I don’t think Medicare reimburses currently for psychotherapy. You’d have to do some math based on the RVUs for those codes, the Medicare conversion factor and the GPCI adjustment for the Bay Area, but you can figure out what they would pay for these codes if they were to pay for them.
Then do some math and see how much of a haircut he’ll be taking if all his commercial insurance payments are now being reimbursed at the Medicare rate.
My guess from having done datawarehousing work for a hospital system is his salary gets cut about in half.
This is one of my frustrations with Bernnie (though not anywhere near a deciding factor in terms of who to vote for)–he consistently misuses the word “socialist”. He doesn’t qualify it with democratic, and he doesn’t mean anything to do collectivizing the means of production. While Scott certainly knows that history, Bernnie grew up a red diaper baby in Jewish Brooklyn in the 50s. He has no excuse whatsoever.
Since as-of-tonight Sanders’s presidential aspirations are essentially over, I don’t mind weighing in on this too much:
My take is that Sanders is a socialist in the traditional/poli-sci sense, and there is ample evidence of such in both his past and current policy proposals. It’s just that, for whatever reason, collective ownership is kind of a ho-hum issue and doesn’t get brought up often. Left-twitter had a few chuckles that, for all the many times Sanders was asked about his socialist label in the debates, it was Michael Bloomberg of all people who first tried to attack him for one of his actually-socialist policies (his mandatory 20% worker-ownership ownership of stock proposal).
And I’m fine with him not having to qualify himself as a “democratic” socialist- no one else feels the need to qualify themselves as a “democratic capitalist”, despite the existence of non-democratic capitalism in many parts of the world.
@guy
I agree. Bernie is a socialist. He would socialize almost everything if he thought it was a viable idea. But he, like all even mildly successful politicians is an incrementalist. The hawks in 1900 didn’t run on constant troop deployments in Germany, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, various islands, etc, plus entangling treaties all around. But here we are.
People tend to have an inaccurate idea of the ‘average voter’ — the fact the ‘average voter’ identifies with the term ‘moderate’ doesn’t mean their positions are what us issues-oriented politics nerds would think of as moderate. The moderate middle is a myth, and swing voters look more like nazbols than bidenbros. (Yes, there are like five libertarians.)
“We need to put a milquetoast centrist against this right-wing populist!” is likely to work about as well as it did four years ago when you consider the actual positions of the ‘center’.
I’m confused about the links you decided to provide. It seems from them that about half of undecided voters are moderate. As far as I know, the literature in this area indicates that centrists almost invariably do better than radicals.
Biden would be “more of the same” if you look at the Obama presidency, I don’t think he’d change his style very much from then (unless you expect whatever administration around him to push for specific policies).
Bernie and democratic socialism – I agree with most of the opinion that, even if he gets elected, he is not going to get half or one-quarter of his policies pushed through, partly because election promises are no more real than unicorns, partly because no, there are big huge systems full of inertia in place to stop any sweeping overhauls or radical changes (see “drain the swamp”) and partly because the litigious nature of American society means that if President Sanders tries “okay, all you student loan bodies which loaned out huge sums of money, you are SOL on getting any of that back”, the stampede of said entities’ lawyers to the courts would tie up the administration for the entire four years, never mind any of the other yuge bigly changes being mooted.
Despite all the doom-mongering, Trump has not destroyed either the USA or the rest of the planet. I think even in the extreme case, the US could manage to survive four years of ‘democratic socialism’ (in the very diluted form it might encounter) with President Sanders. I’m in agreement with adgold that President Warren would be more dangerous because she has the itch to tinker with systems and from her positions with the CFPB and COP would imagine she knows all the ins and outs of governing and how to do it. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The wonderful system of free market capitalism globalisation looks like a much bigger threat, given how the entire house of cards is teetering due to the coronavirus. As I said, I’m an idiot, and personally I think this makes “keep our jobs and manufacturing at home so we make our own drugs and surgical masks and toilet paper” populism electioneering very appealing to other idiots like me who might want to try “four more years for the God-Emperor!”.
We also don’t talk too much about how the Sun is going to rise in the east tomorrow, in spite of the pretty stark contrast with the alternative.
538 now has Bernie Sanders at 2% chance of winning a majority of the delegates, and another 3-4% chance of having a plurality of delegates going into a contested convention. That’s not quite sun-rises-in-the-west odds, but it does take the edge off “we need to talk about this important thing right now”.
Also, Michigan votes in two days, and then we’ll know a lot more. Most likely, we’ll know that Biden is sufficiently inevitable that the only thing left to discuss is which candidate is more likely to drop dead before the Democratic convention. Which, OK, we should probably have a bit of morbid discussion about that, but again there’s no harm in waiting two more days.
the only thing left to discuss is which candidate is more likely to drop dead before the Democratic convention
Ah no, now the fun part is “who gets picked as vice-president?” A black woman to appease minority voters? Mayor Pete to help position him in time for another run four-eight years down the line? Some completely unknown person? Do the dog on it and pick Bernie? 🙂
By “communities”, do you mean the communities, or the leadership?
Because there are obvious reasons for the leadership of EA and to a lesser extent LW to not take public political positions from that particular pulpit. Less even so Scott, but he’s already spoken for himself.
The issue with “Picking a side” in politics is that you are always “Wrong” with at least 50% of people… And of course some percentage of them will decide that they hate you with a white hot hate because you are “One of Them!!”… That’s not always the best strategy for accomplishing things in real life…. Especially when the Party in Power changes on average every 8-years…..
I presume you want us to make an impact by promoting Bernie the New Deal Republican…
@adgold,
I’m assuming that this falls into “hot button” so I’m afraid to discuss this much on “visible Open Threads”, but I spent a half-hour at a LW meeting, and almost an hour at a SSC meeting, if that’s ‘community’ enough I’ll talk your ear off (see previous “hidden Open Threads”), if your near soma San Francisco at 3:30pm to 4pm or north Oakland/east Berkeley/south Richmond at 5pm, let me know, I’ll schedule to meet with you and talk your ear off!
FWIW, my first vote for a Democrat was in ’88, my first for a Republican in ’96, in the 2016 California primary I voted for Sanders, and in 2020 for Biden.
I am flirting with candidate policy nihilism. I am having trouble bringing myself to even study the Democratic candidates’ policy positions very closely, because Congress makes the laws, and the major things people are running on are going to be dead on arrival. They are like the fantasy budgets Trump submits to Congress every year.
With luck, perhaps the Senate will become a bit less of an obstacle, if not now then in two years. But the policy changes that make it through will be much closer to consensus positions than what’s proposed.
Mostly I care about what happens if Congress eventually gets it together to do something. Will the new president veto a consensus bill on a major issue like health care or climate change? I don’t think either Democratic candidate will.
The power of the executive is growing continuously. Trump has been able to build his wall without congressional approval for example. Bernie would pursue his policies unilaterally and this would probably be considerably worse than what you would get with legislation.
@adgold
Isn’t the Democratic primary pretty much over? Sanders ended up with a deficit in a more divided field that should have favored him and the coming states are predicted to favor Biden, making it more likely that Sanders will get into an ‘unelectability’ spiral, rather than that we see him rebound. Basically, the only way I see him win is if Biden does something that makes him look much worse than his gaffes so far, like drop dead, which is the ultimate gaffe.
The idea that EA/LW/SSC communities can make an impact here is rather silly/hubrist, IMO.
One NYT pundit is already writing that Sanders is the real winner of the primaries, which seems like an admission of defeat.
I’m not sure that’s critical to his campaign. Biden is all about having a solid brand, not a pulse 😉
A bunch of people have won elections while being dead, although never a prominent American politician. In my country the leader of a party was murdered during the campaign and he got about 12% of the total number of votes.
Biden is all about having a solid brand, not a pulse
“The first Cryogenic-American President!”
“You can be sure he won’t change his mind on any of his stated positions once elected!”
“Finally a representative for all the deceased voters! Dead doesn’t mean defunct!”
Isn’t that what tradition is for?
@adgold >
For the record I voted for Sanders in 2016, and for Biden in 2020.
I had thought the topic was “hot button”, but since our host responded I guess not, so I”m going in – operationally I think Biden and Sanders would be much the same because all those shiny proposals have to be passed by the House and the Senate.
I invite you to read: Does It Matter Who the Democrats Choose?
In terms of actual policy, probably not very much by Paul Krugman of the NY Times.
I’d further recommend reading: The Simple Reason the Left Won’t Stop Losing
Progressives need to care more about winning,
and
In Search of the American Center
also from thr NY Times,
and from Gallup polls I recommend reading:
The U.S. Remained Center-Right, Ideologically, in 2019,
and I very much encourage reading:
President Richard Nixon’s Special Message to the Congress Proposing a Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan from February 6, 1974
Given where the electorate actually is ideologically, and were Congress is likely to be they’re real restraints on what can be achieved, I was alive when Nixon was pondering healthcare legislation that Kennedy in the Senate deemed “insufficient”, and the proposal died waiting for “something better”, Hell you can look up Truman’s plans from over 70 years ago.
Congress matters.
“Coattails” matter.
Actually winning matters.
The “Overton window”?
I’ll be 52 years old in June, and I’ll be dead waiting for that to bear fruit.
Yeah, I read Haunted by the Reagan era
Past defeats still scare older Democratic leaders — but not the younger generation
and sure, but you know why?
We’ve seen this before.
If under 30 years old voted like under 30 years old voiced do this would be different, but they haven’t and they don’t.
A full loaf after I’m dead if ever isn’t enough, half a loaf soon sounds better, and last I checked most of us near my age agree, and guess who actually bothers to vote?
I forget who it was that described the early US as “all sheet and no rudder”, but the present-day US is all anchor.
I’m starting to see a narrative building up that there’s a disinformation campaign orchestrated by [one or more of: Putin, Trump, Sanders] to convince us of Biden’s cognitive decline, and in actuality he’s as sharp as he’s ever been.
First of all: that’s not saying much.
Second of all: if anyone actually wanted this kind of ineffectual, paranoid, aggrieved messaging, we’d have just nominated Hillary again.
Okay, cheap shots out of the way… this is clearly not a helpful attitude to have, and yet the modern state of politics makes it necessary. Anyone with a social media account, or even just a commenter on a widely read blog, is acting as a “campaign surrogate” whenever they discuss politics. This means you have to be very careful what you say, or else you’re just playing into the hated enemy’s hands. So criticizing your own candidate is right out. Furthermore, since anyone criticizing your candidate is likely an enemy operative or a paid troll, there’s no point in listening to criticism. So we sink deeper and deeper into echo chambers, and self-police ourselves out of dissent. The overriding commandment is “Thou shalt not criticize or disagree with Dear Leader” no matter where you stand or who your Dear Leader is. It’s bottom-up totalitarianism.
I always chafe at being told to shut up and fall in line. The Dear Leader treatment is especially galling for Biden, whose career reads like a list of every mistake the Democrats have made in the last 50 years, and who is clearly not all there anymore. But… *sigh* he’s not as bad as any of the remaining alternatives. So if I have to, fine.
It does not bode well that the Biden team/centrist dems appear to be preemptively laying the groundwork for explaining why losing the 2020 election wasn’t actually their fault.
Like, it’s remarkable that Biden is about to run away with the primary, while simultaneously the overriding tone/message coming out is that everyone is being too mean and unfair to him. That just doesn’t have the vibe of someone who thinks they are actually about to be president in eight months.
I suspect this is your personal bubble.
I’ve heard this as well, and I’m pretty sure that @Guy in TN and I don’t share any sort of bubble.
I really disagree with this assessment, since it only holds true if each candidate has a supporter base that is equally online and attracts equally mean people. If one candidate is uniquely suited to gathering online supporters / supporters willing to troll and one isn’t, then we’re going to see unequal levels of meanness and unfairness.
In such a world, I think it’s pretty reasonable for the (apparently larger) block of people to say “hey, people – you’re being unreasonably mean and unfair, and that’s really not likely to help anything.”
Well, you can agree that the more mean people get online, the more bad blood there’s going to be in the democratic party, correct? And the more bad blood, the more likely it is that certain people are going to, you know, not support whoever the eventual nominee is, correct?
So, basically tamping down now on meanness means a greater likelihood of victory in November.
@Guy in TN says:
I haven’t noticed that, but it wouldn’t surprise, with the job growth and few body bags coming from overseas these past couple of years there’s a head wind against wining against the incumbent.
What I have seen this week is reports of stronger candidates coming out of the woodwork to run for the Senate, and supposedly Biden having better “coattails” and thus there’s now a better chance for a majority Democrats Senate.
As it is, with their open primaries, it looks like a lot of votes for Biden in Virginia and Texas may have come from folks who previously voted Republican, as well as the increase in African American turnout (who while loyal Democrats are more likely to self-identify as “conservative” than other Democrats).
Presumably the Virginia and Texas suburbs voted against Sanders as much if not more than for Biden as polls indicate they decided late, and we’ll see if the suburban voters stay with Biden in November or go back to voting Republican.
From my reading bubble, except for a couple of black columnists who indicated that their grandmothers were convincing that Biden should be the nominee, mostly from the pundits I’m reading some relief that Sanders likely won’t be the nominee (“I just remembered Joe Biden is fine” from The Washington Post is a parody version of that), and a lot of indignation that Warren won’t be the nominee. Overall the scribblers have mostly seemed either pro-Warren, or pro-moderate-that’s-not-Biden-before-he-started-winning.
I voted for Sanders in 2016, but I thought his pro-immigration turn since then, plus that memories of 2009 are dimmer lessened his chances in the general election (except among Latinos), plus the 2018 mid-term elections really indicated to me to that further Left candidates have limited appeal to the electorate.
So far Sanders has won a couple of small very white States, and the far western States of California, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, while Biden swept the South, near South, Minnesota, and even Massachusetts.
There’s a case that Sanders wouldn’t have lost the Obama-to-Trump, and Obama-to-Stein voters and would’ve won in 2016, but at this point I doubt the guys who cast their first vote for a Republican in 2016 will change their minds, especially the ones I know, the potential of “Medicare for illegals” will prevent that.
If more under-30 voters had (or will, the delegate count is still pretty close) come out in numbers as well as percentages for Sanders things would (or will) be different, but don’t despair @Guy in TN, compared to Obama, with his support for a “public option” Biden is Left, and without the House and Senate no progress would’ve been made anyway.
Keep keeping on @Guy in TN, in ten to fifteen years the age cohort that most supported Sanders will be in their 40’s and start turning out to vote, so start cultivating candidates now (and while not quite as Left as Sanders, may I suggest Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown? He’s about ten years younger than Biden and Sanders and has been reliably pro-union).
And then they will vote differently…
My parents voted for McGovern in ’72 and Reagan in ’80.
Aside from people changing their votes, there are also indications that the youths who do vote are atypical. It’s hardly obvious that the subset of youths that vote are similar to those that don’t and that when the cohort ages and more of them vote, the new voters will be similar to those of their cohort that were already voting.
What’s your favourite pub quiz question?
What makes a pub quiz question fun? I think people should have a good chance of getting it correct, either by knowing or guessing. Or at least, people should feel like they *could’ve* got it and say “damn, of course” when they hear the answer. But does that cover it?
A fun question we encountered today while playing Wits and Wagers at a Slate Star Codex meetup:
How many leaves does the tumbo tree have? It is found only in the Namib Desert. (Scientific name: Welwitschia mirabilis)
I think a good quiz question has to be both informative and discriminating. If almost everybody/every team gets the answer right, it’s a poor question. Ditto if almost everybody gets it wrong. If the answer surprises a few people, so much the better.
My favorite – because it informs, discriminates and surprises (quiet a few) is –
“On what day of the year is the earliest sunset? (In London)
Except literally no one is going to answer that question correctly without already knowing it. It’s not something you can figure out from reason or educated guessing.
Yep, fair point.
Our local quiz has a ‘Who Said It?’ round where you have to guess who ten quotes come from. Last week was Homer Simpson versus the Dalai Lama.
Part of the skill in setting a pub quiz isn’t just putting the question together, but putting the round together so overall it’s neither too difficult nor too easy. In any given round, about half of the questions should be relatively easy so people don’t feel like the quiz goes over their heads. The rest should be a mixture of genuinely difficult (but informative) and ”damn, of course”.
The other important aspect is that pub quizzes are a team game. Questions should ideally have multiple plausible answers to stimulate table discussion.
I’m stealing this example from someone who is much better at pub trivia than I am.
He gives as his response to this question: “What US city, top 10 in terms of population, shares it’s name with an international capitol.” It’s a good question, because while you’ve definitely heard of the US city, you would have to be unusually good with demographics to enumerate all 10. Similarly, there’s a good chance that if you knew which of the 189 countries was referenced in the question, you would be able to name it’s capitol, but you’re unlikely to be able to get there by enumeration. To me, the key element is that knowing more things is helpful, but thinking hard about it can also help.
That’s an excellent one that reminds me of one of my other favorites:
“What is the only US State capital to have a population over a million?”
As a Georgia native, I want to say Atlanta, even though I know it’s not the expected answer. It’s a trick question, because the actual city limits, and hence official population of Atlanta is relatively small, but metropolitan Atlanta covers over half the people in the entire state. If you go by the number of people who would call themselves residents of Atlanta, there’s millions of people.
I tried coming up with a top ten list, and I was really sure about these:
arj lbex
ybf natryrf
puvpntb
ubhfgba
cuvynqrycuvn
cubravk
And pretty sure about these:
fna qvrtb
obfgba
ngynagn
I was astounded to discover afterwards that two of those were not top ten.
Any trivia question that hinges upon the technical boundaries of cities vs metro areas is a poorly designed question – because this distinction is highly variable and largely meaningless.
@Loriot, the Metropolitan are of Atlanta probably does win for “largest-by-population Metro Area surrounding a State Capital.”
I had no idea what the answer was, so I found the relevant list on Wikipedia. The answer turns out to be (in ROT13): cubravk, nevmban
@Nick,
looking at your list, you do have the correct answer. But your list includes several large cities that are not the capital city of their respective States. (In ROT13:
Nyonal vf pncvgny bs gur Fgngr bs Arj Lbex, Fnpenzragb vf pncvgny bs Fgngr bs Pnyvsbeavn, naq Fcevatsvryq vf gur pncvgny bs gur Fgngr bs Vyyvabvf.)
@S_J
I was listing top ten most populous cities per the top most question, not top ten most populous capitals. Shouldn’t the fact that I listed both LA and SD have been a dead giveaway? ._.
I got this one. I’d say it’s easier than the other.
It is certainly funny how many state capitals are small cities. I’m curious how often the choice of a smaller or more out of the way city was deliberate, versus an accident of history that it failed to grow. It seems to me that with our coastal states, for instance, if you wanted a growing city for your capital, pick a coastal city. But neither Sacramento nor Salem are coastal, to pick two. Likewise Harrisburg, Richmond, and Tallahassee.
My theory was that in the early days (before well developed transportation networks), there was a strong incentive to place the seat of government in a location that was accessible to the population, or roughly in the population center of the state as of that time.
That would certainly explain something like Salem, which is approximately in the middle of the willamette valley, which is where the vast majority of the population of Oregon resides.
Generally speaking, that’s how you would get “inland but not too far inland” capitals, as in most coastal states, most of the population will be near the coast, but some of it will be scattered out farther inland.
Oh, it’s definitely easier, just one of those interesting quirks that is fun to see.
None of the coastal towns the Oregon pioneers founded grew very big, though. The big city ended up being Portland due to its position where the Columbia River (which flows to the sea) meets the Willamette (which doesn’t, but was where all the agricultural land was once Washington State voted itself Not-Part-of-Oregon).
Astoria, which is where ships enter and exit the Columbia, is a cool little town aesthetically (which is why they filmed The Goonies there), but a seaport wasn’t important enough to support more than 9,800 people for some reason.
Speaking from personal experience – it’s because the waters around Astoria a goddamn terrifying to sail through in any kind of weather. It’s a potentially convenient location, but those currents are way to gnarly to support any kind of major ship terminal.
ETA: it’s not just Astoria. Pretty much anything north of, say, San Francisco is just an absolute nightmare and even that’s in a very well-protected bay. IMO, that’s why all the major ports (Seattle, Portland, Tacoma) have several hours of transit between the bar and the port.
@Le Maistre Chat
That’s interesting! Thanks for the correction. I should have recalled that rivers were important, too. I’ve even heard a (contrarian, maybe?) take that cities were often founded even on rivers that you could never sail ship traffic down.
Well, any sufficiently old city basically has to be located on either a river or a large freshwater lake, because those are the only places where drinking water is available in sufficient quantities as to support a large population.
Oregon is an interesting case because it’s one of the states where I suspect there has been the least amount of drift in terms of the geographic population center between now and when it first gained statehood. Sure enough, according to the 2010 census, the geographic population center of the state is located a bit to the southeast of Salem, with Salem being the closest real city to it.
California’s population center today is close to Bakersfield, quite far from Sacramento, but of course southern California (particularly LA) grew by huge amounts in the late 20th century, and wasn’t a huge consideration in the early days. Virginia’s current center is a bit northwest of Richmond (but closer to Richmond than any other major city). And sure enough, Pennsylvania’s is a bit to the northwest of Harrisburg (but closer to Harrisburg than any other major city).
Even aside from that, the inland geography is such that having large coastal cities never made any sense. From southern Washington through Northern California, the coastal mountain range (a smaller mountain range, but mountainous nonetheless) starts just inland and extends well into the state, separating the coast from most of the viable farmland.
So in between the coast and the farmland is a bunch of basically unusable land that isn’t particularly easy to navigate. Even today, getting from the Willamette Valley to the Oregon Coast requires a 1-2 hour trip often via windy and unpleasant roads. Parts of Northern California are even worse (getting from Mendocino back to the 101 is probably some of the craziest stretches of road I’ve ever encountered in the US)
I assume you’re going for Cubravk but forgot about Nhfgva.
Population is only 964,254 according to Wikipedia. Probably has just recently passed a million, but still officially behind it.
Eh. A list of top population centers had it at over 1M. According to the official city website it’s 996,369 as of 1/1/2020, so your question will be outdated as soon as net 3,631 people either move there or are born.
@Conrad Honcho
To be fair, I first heard the question in college, which was … not recently.
But you’re right, as of last Wednesday, it’s no longer valid. Unless Corona-chan comes to help me out by making it valid again.
Can you tell us the answer? I thought about this one for a long time and my best guess was (rot13) fnvag wbfrcu va fcnavfu.
Gung’f gur bar V tbg gbb, naq V’z cerggl fher vg’f evtug. Vg yrncg gb zvaq orpnhfr na ryqre ng zl puhepu jnf n zvffvbanel va Cnanzn naq ur naq uvf jvsr ubarlzbbarq va Fna Wbfr, Pbfgn Evpn.
The answer was indeed gur ubzr bs gur funexf bs gur angvbany ubpxrl yrnthr. Given that it ranks exactly 10th in terms of “city limits population,” I feel like “top 10” is something of a cheap trick. On the list of metro areas by population, it ranks right around other places that people are supposed to have heard of, like “Milwaukee,” “Nashville,” and “Cleveland.”
Name two other people who died on November 22, 1963.
(P. F. Yrjvf naq Nyqbhf Uhkyrl.)
This is a good one I’ve heard before. (I remembered the first name but not the second.)
I guessed Lee Harvey Oswald, but he actually died November 24.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this one before…
In what Canadian city can a person look to the North, and see an American city?
Jvaqfbe, bagnevb, ybbxvat abegu gb qrgebvg.
Unless you go with the geographical sense in which Canadians can insist their cities are “American” too.
I couldn’t name the Canadian city, but I knew the American city.
Sticking with the geographical theme: which US state is closest to Africa?
V’ir urneq guvf bar orsber, naq znvar V oryvrir vf gur nafjre.
I just looked this up. Very cool question.
I play District Trivia every Thursday at a boardgame cafe in College Park.
To our team, the best questions combine knowledge of trivia with context clues. For example, each main round contains ten questions, worth 1-10 points, in order. We’ve gotten questions right by noticing they’re early, and therefore we shouldn’t overthink, and by noticing they’re late, and therefore we should not give what seems like the easy obvious answer.
Pub trivia is also arguably well served by having variety. Some questions are straight up esoteric: you know it or you don’t (who directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?); others are kinda deducible (which US capital translates as “green mountain”?). There’s also variety of media. It’s like the game Cranium – you have sound and visuals. There’s a music round where you name the song and artist from the song clip (ten in all); and earlier, a picture round where you name the $whatever from the picture provided. Sometimes it’s easy – e.g. name the company from the logo (minus any giveaway text). Sometimes it’s harder (name the female head of state).
There’s a class of questions where if you know it, great, but if you don’t, you have a fighting chance at a guess. My favorite was a picture round at our finals event: guess the election year from the electoral map results.
A good example of a trivia question that isn’t fun is one that seems fun at first, but turns out to be horribly ambiguous (within two, how many people are mentioned in We Didn’t Start the Fire?).
None, I don’t think. The capital of Vermont (the Green Mountain State), Montpelier, is nicknamed the ‘Green Mountain City’, but it doesn’t mean ‘green mountain’. It means “Mount Pelier”, which if it means anything, means “Mount Woad”.
So… “Mount Blue”?
(…is the capital of “green mountain”)
I had a thinko. The question was about state names, not US capital names.
I write Weird Fiction, and stuff I learn about from reading SSC is great fodder for this. (Bizarre cognitive disorders! Wacky historical conspiracy theories! Information hazards! Hallucinogenic entities from beyond the realms of men!)
Perhaps there are other people on here who have the same inclination. If so, where else is good fodder for Weird Fiction?
I have an answer for you here.
Tvtropes has a lot of that kind of material.
Edit: Should have been a reply, not a top level comment.
I was momentarily wondering whether you were saying TVTropes had addressed zinc supplements or algorithmic radicalization – and I could half-believe either one.
Or leaking toilets 😛
@Plumber, or anyone else who wants to take a crack at it, here’s a toilet question:
I recently replaced the innards of my kids’ toilet with a dual-flush system. (This one.) Even after carefully cleaning the fitting at the bottom of the tank and readjusting the fit of the blue dome-shaped gasket, I still have a trickle of water dribbling into the bowl.
I REALLY don’t want to have to uninstall this and return it and go buy something else and install that. (And probably have more issues with that.) What should I do?
PS. If I only fill the tank up with about an inch of water — enough to just surpass the level of the blue gasket’s seal — the trickle is gone, which leads me to believe when the tank is full then it’s the extra water pressure around the gasket that breaks its seal. But I’m still not sure what I can do about that.
Unfortunately that valve results in two places water could be leaking from — the seal between the blue dome and the flush valve seat, and the internal flush tower seal. If it starts leaking once the water is over the flush tower seal, it’s probably that one, and you’ll need a replacement (or maybe a replacement flush tower seal).
Was the toilet leaking before you put this in? If so, it’s possible the problem wasn’t the flapper but the seat, and you’ll need to repair that.
Yes, the toilet was leaking before I put this in. Previously it had a conventional flapper, and it leaked even after I took that out, inspected it, and cleaned it.
As I told @Plumber, I checked the seat very carefully, and in an inch of water the gasket seemed to prevent water trickling through. It’s only when I fill the tank up the rest of the way that the trickle came back.
At this point you might consider pulling the new thing out, installing a new conventional flapper (no need to re-install the old lever and chain, this is just a test), and seeing if that leaks. If it does, you need to repair or replace the seat. If it doesn’t, return the new thing (and reinstall the old lever and chain).
It’s starting to sound like it is the seat.
I haven’t entered the dreaded words into Youtube yet…is that difficult to replace?
ETA: Or maybe the overflow pipe, as Plumber theorized.
@Well…,
I assume that you first did the food coloring in the tank to see if it’s leaking into the bowl, usually with these leaks it’s the flapper not getting a good seal (either the flapper itself or the seat), but I’m not seeing a flapper in your link, maybe you can try tightening the blue gasket connection (or maybe you overtighned and deformed it?).
I’d call it the manufacturer, maybe they have some advice, but more likely they’ll send you replacement parts that you can try to see if they fit (usually enough time on the phone gets you freebies), starting with the blue “dome gasket”
since the “dome gasket” works as the flapper, that’s probably where the leak is (if there is a leak) unless your fill valve is leaking, but since it’s new I doubt it, but to check just shutoff the water supply after the tank is full.
This stuff is why I mostly hate plumbing and wouldn’t do it without being paid.
Try to get a replacement dome gasket from the manufacturer, tell them you got a “lemon”, though it could be the seat, which is a slightly bigger job.
Good luck.
I checked the link between the blue dome gasket and the fitting in the base of the tank (tthis is called the “seat”?) several times very carefully, to make sure it sealed all the way around, to make sure the gasket wasn’t deforming, etc. Like I said, the gasket did its job in an inch of water, but seems to not do its job (not completely anyway) when the tank is full.
I checked last night by shutting off the supply and walking away for an hour. When I came back the tank was down to about 1/4 full.
If there’s something wrong with the seat I can’t figure out what it is, or why there’d be no trickle in an inch of water but would be one when the tank is full.
@Well… >
That’s a really fast leak, my guess is that the overflow tube is cracked or has a bad seal.
Try asjusting and lowering the float to see if you can get the water level below the (potential) crack, in the meantime turn the supply off! You’re using a lot of water!
I wondered how much water I was actually losing. I hear the toilet “take a sip” from the supply every few hours.
Is it easy to repair a crack in an overflow tube, or is it easier to just replace it?
@Well…,
It’s easier to replace.the overflow tube than repair it (with what? glue?).
Probably the problem is the seat, but I’m not familiar with your dual-flush system.
I’d definitely call the manufacturer for advice (or free parts).
I don’t know anything about “dual-flush” toilets in particular, but in standard toilets one way there can be a continuing trickle into the bowl is from an unintended siphon effect.
There’s a vertical pipe in the tank that feeds into the bowl. There’s supposed to be a little rubber feed into this pipe that outputs water while the talk is refilling (diverting a bit of the flow there), so that the bowl will have the standard level of water in it (and maybe also so that the flow cleans the bowl a bit). If this feed is actually inside the pipe, such that its end is in water, a siphon may be set up that continues to move water into the bowl (from the water in the tank) even after the tank is full.
The end of rubber feed is supposed to be attached to a little gizmo above the end of the pipe, so that there will be no siphon. But someone might instead have just stuffed the end into the pipe, causing the problem.
I know the pipe (or hose?) you’re talking about. It’s clipped in place, ABOVE the top of the overflow pipe but pointed into it.
For anyone who is wondering why the high-pitched shrieking from CNBC has gotten worse tomorrow:
1) On Saturday, the OPEC-Russia (OPEC+) alliance to control oil prices imploded. Both nations had previously worked together to control production to keep prices high. However, Russia intends to increase oil production significantly in April, and the Saudis are following suit, as much to punish Russia as anything else. According to their public stance, Russia is doing this to destroy US shale oil production – if the oil price gets too low, oil shale extraction becomes economically nonviable. Something like this happened in late 2015/early 2016; ultimately, OPEC+ blinked and cut production, allowing the revival of US shale production. This time, Russia seems to be playing for keeps.
2) As a result, oil prices have plunged ~30%. In about two days. Crude briefly dipped below $28/barrel. This is going to gut the corporate energy sector; below $30/barrel, I’m not sure anyone can turn a real profit, even the Saudis.
3) This has catalyzed a massive drop in US Treasury yields, as the result of some combination of forced deleveraging, an amplification of the pre-existing coronavirus panic, and a collapse in junk bonds (which are closely connected, at least in the US, to shale oil). The entire US treasury curve – all notes, at all durations – at least briefly traded below 1%. I don’t think this has ever happened before.
I was pretty sure we were in for a recession as a result of the coronavirus, but I thought it would be more of a 1990/2001 style slowdown. This is different: it looks more like the early days of the last global financial crisis.
Fuck.
Could anyone please explain why Russia playing silly buggers for a bit makes everyone think the economy is going to implode (worse than it was already going to)?
a) US shale oil is very important to high-yield bonds. If US shale becomes insolvent, it reduces demand for high-yield, increasing interest rates for poorly-rated companies globally, and especially in the US. If those companies can’t get access to credit, it has serious consequences for global growth.
b) US shale oil is important to the US economically. In late 2015/early 2016, several states experienced slow or no growth because of the shale collapse, resulting in sub-2% growth in 2015 Q3 and Q4 US GDP. Not quite a national recession, but close. The economic background is quite a lot worse now than it was in 2016, so this seems likely to tip the US over into full-fledged economic contraction.
c) Global oil demand is already low because of the coronavirus. The global oil industry can’t easily survive a period of low demand and glutted supply.
The global oil industry can’t easily survive a period of low demand and gutted supply
This seems a little bit catastrophic, as perspectives go. Have there been no periods in the past where these things occurred? Is it not the case that the solution to low oil prices is……. low oil prices? Surely the price mechanism has the feature that it deals – quickly and perhaps ruthlessly – with periods of over supply, in a similar way to which it deals with under supply? The least efficient, most over-leveraged firms go bust. And the industry is left fitter and more efficient than it was before the low price situation.
In a couple of years time I fully expect to see a functioning global oil industry. With the oil price a fair bit higher than it is today.
That works in the ideal homogeneous-regulation, rational, company-centric, (spherical, frictionless…) situation. But the fact is that it will have negative externalities on the US (lost jobs! no credit! party time!), and therefore propagate through much of the western economy. Cui bono? Russia, at least in relative terms. So it makes sense for the Russian government (which is obviously not subject to US market regulations or stuff like the SEC) to practice a bit of price-dumping, lose money if necessary, for the sake of a higher strategic goal.
Wasn’t that exactly what OPEC and the Russians attempted to do in 2015/2016? It seems to me it had the opposite effect to what they intended – the shale industry had a big incentive (survival..) to make their business more efficient, did so dramatically and ended up with a bigger share of the market with higher profits.
Sure, many firms will suffer, and also there’ll be some knock on effects, but when the market picks up again – which it will – I expect the shale drillers to be able to make a profit at a lower oil price than they can now, and to also have a bigger market share than they do now.
I don’t mean to be willfully unsympathetic to people losing their jobs in America, but it is part of everyone getting wealthier (long term) and I don’t see a global recession occurring as a result of (as Loriot says above) the Russians playing silly buggers.
That’s a very good point. Reminds me a bit how even ARAMCO is opening hoses of money into more efficient fuel engine design following the electric car boom.
Still, while I don’t think it would destroy the world economy, the different circumstances (i.e. short-term but acute market distrust and difficult credit, thanks to Covid19 paranoia) may have pushed someone in the Kremlin to think it was a good time to try again. Does not necessarily mean that it will be a successful strategy, but answering to @Loriot, it would explain the behaviour.
On the other hand, and like you, I would rather see our industries become more efficient than keep a few jobs here and there. I’m not sure how much that is shared by current political forces.
Isn’t Russia’s price of production a lot higher than Saudi Arabia’s? I think Russia loses a ton of money if oil stays at this price for long.
@albatross11
I don’t know the figures, but I can believe it.
Yet if Russia wants to heavily disrupt the main strategic resource of Saudi Arabia, it can sure afford to lose some of its many resources. After all, a military invasion is a pure loss, from the immediate economical perspective, and it hasn’t stopped states from taking the gamble before. Whether it pays off or not…
The current break-even price for Russia’s national budget seems to be $51/barrel. So yes, they’re going into debt by doing this. But this article also claims that they can afford to take the hit: Russia has cut domestic spending to the bone and they’re running a surplus right now.
I don’t understand the logical connection here. If risky companies in sector A collapse that shouldn’t on its own effect credit markets for risky companies in sector B.
America consumes about the same amount of oil as she produces, so an oil price change will hurt some Americans and benefit others. Anyway, you’re reasoning from a price change; asking how the price change affects the market without considering that the price change could be a result of the market. The problem is not that an oil price drop hurts the economy but that it signals lower expected demand from the economy in the future. If the oil price drop is due to more production, there is not problem, which is what it looks like.
It still does, though. HYXE is a high-yield bond etf that specifically excludes the energy sector, and it’s still down 2.8% today. Comparatively, HYG (a high-yield etf that includes energy) is down 4.68%. Safe-haven flight hits everyone.
c) Global oil demand is already low because of the coronavirus. The global oil industry can’t easily survive a period of low demand and glutted supply.
Take pity on me, I am an idiot and this is an idiot’s question. Will such cheap oil include home heating oil and will cheaper prices not be a benefit? Or is it that they would only benefit the consumer but the prices are too low for suppliers to stay in business?
As an aside, the coronavirus has been very instructive for me in how the global economy is as stable as a house of cards and as delicate as thistledown: globalisation is fantastic for raising the standard of living and all the rest of it right up until one corner starts to wobble then it all comes down. I think we’re getting important historical data via lived experience as to just why things like the Black Death were such disasters; it’s not so much the deaths from sickness, it’s the knock-on effects of curtailing travel and trade and interference with consumption and production and so forth.
Cheaper oil is a boon to consumers, certainly. The problem is that it will drive at least some oil producers out of business, and that will have knock-on effects on the broader economy. If consumers spend everything they get from cheaper oil prices, the damage will be minimal, but if they save some or all of it, the net effect will be negative. Nations that have little or no oil industry will probably not be as badly affected.
I don’t get why the price of an input to the economy falling would have such a negative effect. If we invented cheap fusion tomorrow would the economy also collapse? Would cheap platinum from space mining cause the economy to collapse?
I just have always had a hard time accepting this. I probably still don’t accept it, although I know to say that it is true in the “guess the teacher’s password” sense.
Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about the economy.
Oil isn’t just an input to the economy, it is part of the economy. A big part. Additionally, part of the reason oil is getting so cheap is that the economy isn’t in good shape.
Food is a universal economic input, right? Imagine if someone outside of the US started selling wheat at 1/100 the normal price. You’d have a few effects for US farmers:
1) Some farmers without cash reserves or easy access to credit go bankrupt entirely and stop producing wheat.
2) Other farmers continue producing wheat, but cut back on their normal consumption and reinvestment in their farms.
3) People who were spending money on wheat and wheat by-products get the benefit of lower prices, but unless they spend every penny they save on other stuff, net consumption still drops.
The end result is a drop in total investment and (usually) a drop in total consumption, which means a reduction in overall economic growth.
I wanted to suggest an example of food prices falling precipitously and putting all the farmers out of business, which is what happened to 98% of farmers over 200 years.
It is not that the price falling that is causing the negative effect, it is the cause of the price falling. If prices fell because someone announced a massive new oil field discovery with really cheap extraction costs then there would be a net gain to the world economy. This is not that, this is two major producers shifting from cooperation to competition, and the world financial markets are basically designed to work when everyone is cooperating and not so much when countries are antagonizing each other (see the stock market reactions to the trade war with China). If you are an investment vehicle (bank, fund whatever) and you put a chunk of your portfolio in oil shale extraction companies then this move might just put you out of business overnight. Your bonds could literally go to zero, which is not normally the case for bankruptcy.
If you are uncertain about your oil bonds then the way to survive is to slash other new loans and hoard capital to avoid bankruptcy and avoid forced selling of your bonds at lows. These are the seeds of a liquidity crisis, it doesn’t matter if the Fed slashes rates you are not going to lend, hell with the regulatory structure and capital requirements you might not be legally allowed to lend.
If this happens to enough banks and funds then you lose price discovery which is the foundation of modern capital markets. To use something as collateral you have to have a price attached to it, without that financial transactions dry up to the point where only forced sellers (liquidators) exist and economic activity grinds to a halt.
Almost all farmers entirely cut wheat production and almost all farmers who were growing wheat file for bankruptcy.
What are they reinvesting in their farms? If wheat prices fall before the harvest is sold, but after the cost of the harvest has been spent, then you have roughly zero dollars to reinvest. If you look for outside capital your pitch is ‘Hey I am on the verge of bankruptcy because Saudi Awheatia just crashed wheat prices, can I borrow some money to grow legumes, I’m pretty sure Soydi Abeanea isn’t going to crash that market and ruin your investment’.
An instructive lesson for those who think that oil shale will be back in a few years.
Housing starts in the US MAYBE, with a huge couple of month surge, got back to the pre 2008 LOWS this past year. 15 years after the peak in construction and we have many fewer housing starts. In 2005/2006 the US had the capacity to finish more than 2 million housing units a year, the peak since then is ~ 1.4 million. The capacity to build 600,000-800,000 homes is just gone now.
@broblawsky:
I understood that reference.
On the subject of the ability of the oil market to adapt:
I can buy that it may be that the field gets wiped out in a way that it cannot recover, leading to worse emissions and enriching evil nations.
What is the best story I could use to convince someone that is only basically this side of “the evil oil industry runs the world” that we might need some kind of tax/regulatory policy to keep the shale companies alive, and/or what would that policy be?
How much of that pre-2008 housing construction was economically useful though? If it was a result of bubble mania, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to get back to those levels.
Housing starts were below most of levels of the 80s and 90s as well as below the early 2000s (which were significantly higher than the 90s).
If you say that the late 90s rates were normal then the 2000s over produced by 1.5-2 million units which was then corrected for by 2010/11.
@baconbits
A plot of actual production is not a plot of capacity. There’s nothing to demonstrate that home building could not be rapidly ramped up over a year or two, as it has been in the past. (I’m not saying it’s necessarily false, just that you’ve presented no evidence for it.)
More importantly this sort of analogy between industries is totally invalid. Some industries can adjust quickly to changes in demand. Some can’t. You have to actually look at the particulars of the industry in question.
We are 12 years past Lehman Brothers collapse, large numbers of people and capital have been moved out of that space. Construction workers as a % of total employment is still 12% lower than the early 2000s peak and that is after 6-7 years of steady growth. The fact that the decline has persisted for over a decade is proof for anyone who wants to spend a bit of time thinking about the implications of that decade.
Can it be ramped up? Of course, almost any sector can be ramped up, but the question isn’t about ‘could it possibly be ramped up again’ its ‘what happens in the near term to industry X after a disruption like this’. The answer is generally not a V shaped recovery.
We aren’t talking about if they hypothetically could ramp up production, we are asking if the will. The major question is not the particulars of the industry it is the willingness of capital to flow into the industry. Yes each industry would have different lead time given capital, but no industry is going to ramp up without it which is why that is the crucial concern.
I’d say an important question is if it should ramp up.
Part of the collapse was the oversupply of housing. Expecting the industry to return to a state of affairs where they were producing more houses than people were buying seems… off.
That doesn’t look like damage to the industry to me, that looks like a correction.
Saudi Arabia is cutting prices on oil by $10 a barrel, and they can produce 12 million bbl a day, so they are forgoing up to $120 million dollars per day in pure profit. Over the course of a year that would b 7-8% of their GDP, and they are doing it voluntarily. This alone is concerning,
If it weren’t for the risk of damage to the US fracking industry, that would be pure stimulus. How kind of the Saudis!
I haven’t thought about this deeply but I’m not convinced it is net bad. Very low oil prices obviously hurt you if you’re an oil company, but they are good for oil consumers, which is just about everyone else. The US is a net exporter of oil but not a large one. The shale industry will have a lot of short-term pain but will most likely be fine long-term as companies which are in trouble get bought out; interest rates are low so hopefully financing for such purchases is easy to get, barring another financial crisis of course.
Yeah, basically the only impact is whether our shale industry can get by until Russia blinks or if they’ll run into a liquidity crisis and lay off people.
Oh they’ll definitely lay off lots of people. But I don’t see any way for a temporary drop in oil prices to kill the shale industry as a whole – capacity will re-expand when oil prices get high again.
Yeah, I meant “lay off enough people to destabilize the local economy”.
I wouldn’t generally be blase about this, its a fairly important event all around.
The actual shale industry losing money is just the start, that is not a huge deal itself unless your pension plan has a 5% exposure to the high yield bonds in the shale industry causing them to lose money. That itself is not a big deal unless one of the following is true
1. It was underfunded to being with
2. It was using leverage to buy those bonds
3. It is forced to sell bonds due to their downgrades
4. Something else that amplifies the losses.
It is very likely that someone is going to go belly up thanks to this move (if it sticks). If that someone is a Wall Street fund, no big deal (probably, but possibly a big deal depending on the size/leverage etc) but if a public pension fund blows up because of this then its likely that some politician will use it as a whipping boy and push to get new laws passed about what those funds can and can’t own, leaning heavily toward the can’t, which will pull a major funding source away from them.
In the short to intermediate run it is going to be wildly risky to restart shale drilling again if every time you get the pumps turned on the Saudis can threaten to tank oil prices for a week/month/6 months and run you out of business. If you add on regulation that makes funding even harder to come by you can kill the shale industry (ie reduce it by a large amount for a long time) and that will make their bonds worth even less at sale.
This is without getting into serious counter-party risk either, which is what caused most of the actual pain during the 2008 crisis.
Why does this even need a politician to get involved?
I am the farthest thing from an expert, but if the shale oil economy tanks out bad enough to drag a public pension fund with it, I would expect the sensible result would be public pensions to completely abandon investment in that industry.
The public pension systems that would be dragged down by a shale oil collapse are badly run and have years or decades worth of problems that lead them to be taken down by such an event. The problem here is fragility and not that the shale sector is specifically to risky to invest in.
This is a case where the costs are concentrated and visible and the benefits are diffuse and less visible. Shale oil miners become much more likely to fail, but virtually everything else in the whole economy gets a boost, including industries that badly need a boost such as airlines.
If you only talk about costs then of course it looks bad. But if you want to prove something is bad, then you have to actually go and estimate the costs and benefits and compare the size of the two. In this case both the costs and the benefits are very uncertain and so the result is not at all obvious to me.
if a public pension fund blows up
I would be really surprised if a pension fund was heavily overweight shale oil. That sort of institution generally is quite diversified and doesn’t take big directional sector bets. If a pension fund “blows up,” however you define blowing up, it’s mostly going to be because of the broad-based market decline that has been going on.
every time you get the pumps turned on the Saudis can threaten to tank oil prices for a week/month/6 months and run you out of business
Eh, it’s one of many business risks. Small undiversified companies will have problems if prices fall, but any major oil company has lots of production from lots of sources, so it can temporarily idle production and wait for prices to get high again. And if the company really hates uncertainty then this is the sort of thing that Wall Street is happy to help you hedge. Perhaps shale companies will hedge more aggressively in the future.
I agree with you, but “short-term” might mean a year or more. I’m willing to commit to a prediction that this will have serious negative impacts.
I keep making this point generally about the effects of some of the more extreme measures people are advocating for with regards to the coronavirus (that we’re not just talking about a 2 month economic dip) but nobody seems to want to hear it.
I don’t get how people are talking about something unprecedented since WW2 and coming out the other side right back into exactly the same situation that we were in going in. Just the risk calculations for life and health insurance industries will have to change at a minimum. Realistically we are looking at 30% of GDP added to national debts+CB balance sheets across the board as a baseline scenario.
Wait, can you unpack this? I’m not sure I get what you mean; you’re saying that COVID19 is a external threat of such magnitude that WWII is the most recent comparable example? Are you talking in terms or deaths? Economic disruption? Where would that extra 30% of debt come from?
@ Aftgaley
To slow the virus down China basically turned off half of its economy. People weren’t going into work, things aren’t getting made, transported, or sold. That is going to be a short term collapse in tax revenue at a minimum. During the GFC the US budget deficit went from 1% of GDP in 2007 to 3% in 2008 to 10% in 2009, in 2019 the deficit was already at 4.5%.
Not that anyone remembers but Bush II signed a ‘stimulus’ plan in Feb 2008 for well over $100 billion, the early stimulus plans being kicked around right now are in the $3-400 billion range and we haven’t even had job losses yet or the likely financial crisis.
Ah, gotcha. I hadn’t seen anywhere that people were already considering multi-billion dollar stimulus packages; i thought most of the disruptions were presumably temporary, like the stuff in China.
Thank you!
@Aftagley
Sure, the current disruptions are temporary, but its like those old pre-LED lights in basketball stadiums…takes a long time for them to turn back on once they get cut off.
“Last” as in “newest”, as in “previous”, or as in “final”?
Previous. I’m not a prepper.
Don’t want to get CW here, but let’s just say that in the current media environment, I am not particularly inclined to take the word of anyone who is speculating that Russia is doing some crazy thing for the sole purposes of harming the US economy, with no concern to themselves.
And the fact that we’ve seemingly already settled on a meme wherein this is all Russia’s fault and Saudi Arabia is just some poor victim who is forced to go along with it as well makes me all the more suspicious…
And western IOCs shouldn’t skirt the blame here either. If your multi-billion dollar corporation was built on a business model that is sustainable only so long as you enjoy the goodwill of the governments of Russia and Saudi Arabia, well, you might very well be said to deserve what’s coming…
Not to pile on CW style, but +1
I understand what you’re saying here, but Rosneft’s hostility to shale oil – especially US shale – isn’t new.
I would at least consider the proposal that Russia would destabilize the west given an opportunity. But there’s also the Middle East, where Russia supports Syria and Iran, traditional rivals of the Saudis. And while Saudi Arabia has lower production costs (I’m pretty sure) than Russia, and thus can turn a profit at a lower price, the Saudis also have a huge military and a budget deficit, and few other industries to fall back on. So the low price might hurt the Saudis worse.
Just speculating, of course. Most likely, they simply don’t trust each other to be loyal cartel members.
@Broblawsky
I think you’re overestimating how much of this is being done to hurt the US. It’s definitely something they’re thinking about, but it’s likely not their only concern. Just off the top of my head:
1. This move looked like it was being driven pretty hard by Saudi Arabian, which may be why Russian hackles were raised. Putin may be deciding that he wants to see a more consensus-based OPEC+ (or one more dominated by Russia).
2. Unlike SA, Russia’s oil-producing firms at least try to pretend to be independent from the State. I’m sure Putin could direct them to reduce production, but couldn’t that loss of separations potentially increase their vulnerability to sanctions and make international investors less confident?
3. I haven’t worked through all the implications myself, but I know Russia likes to position itself as the modern-day protector of Iran and Venezuela – two countries with troubled economies that are completely reliant on oil. Would Saudi Arabia’s proposed action hurt their ability to remain solvent-ish?
It’s Russia breaking an agreement that’s held for months, though. It’s not like they had to do anything more than hold existing production levels.
I don’t think anyone really believes Rosneft is separate from the Kremlin. And yes, they’re vulnerable to sanctions – there’s an argument that this move was based at least as much on recent responses to Rosneft sanctions by the US as to a direct desire to increase market share.
It definitely hurts Venezuela – their oil is expensive to process. I’m not sure about Iran. Regardless, Russia might just not care enough about their economic survival, or they might just think that both countries are screwed economically no matter what they do.
Want to panic a little about a coming financial crisis? Look into the repo market and the Eurodollar.
Long story short there is a lot of heavily leveraged money in inter bank loans (US Banks lending to international Banks) which is often secured by less than stellar colateral. In case something bad happens, let’s say a distrubtion of the global supply chain, a lot of that colateral could fail, which could lead to this international banks defaulting, which could lead to american banks defaulting.
Yep the repo market.
Oh, and the Japanese Yen, Japan contracted by 6% annually in Q4 2019, and that was with the Yen averaging ~ 108 to the dollar. Its at 102 now and a strengthening Yen has been bad news for the Japanese economy, plus the cornavirus and collapsing world trade? Japan ran 8% of GDP budget deficits for 5 years while the Yen was strong post GFC, and their debt to GDP started out at 175% of GDP (2007) and was at 238% in 2018 (and 2019 estimates put it over 240%. Just 8% annual deficits coming back without a GDP decline would push them toward 300% of GDP, at some point that will break and we will see a major economy lose their currency for the first time since the 1920s.
People have been predicting that Japan’s massive debt would cause a collapse for decades.
The real problem with Japan is that they keep shooting themselves in the foot by raising the consumption tax. Every time they raise it, the economy predictably crashes again.
Why do you think they keep increasing their taxes? Their CB already owns 100%+ worth of GDP in assets and they are buying a broad variety of assets in the name of stimulating their economy.
My parents racked up all this debt and all I got was this lousy stagnant economy! Japan is a trade and technology based economy that couldn’t grow during the largest expansion of worldwide trade and broad technological growth in the past 70 years. Yes there is a cautionary tale in predicting collapse early and often, but they are in bad shape and they know it, hence the perpetual stimulus.
I can’t figure out what you meant here. Was this a rhetorical question?
@ broblawsky
It always seems different this time. You may be an expert on the economy, or have a functioning crystal ball, but barring that, I’m going to view comments like yours skeptically, especially when they overlap with any political issues. I’m content to avoid CNBC (and all the others), keep feeding my 403b according to my chosen asset allocation, and see how things actually unfold over the next few months.
Well, good luck.
Are you mocking the phrase “it’s different this time” against the idea that and financial crises happen? Because that’s the opposite of how it’s usually meant.
I think we’re in for a world of hurt the next couple years. My only hope is that it spurs us to figure out how to deal with new diseases without shoving the economy into the meat grinder or else we can probably look forward to significant recessions every 7-12 years.
I mean, this is a perfectly good time to fund your retirement accounts. Get in cheap.
Still not cheap enough for my tastes.
Give it time. 😉 🙁
I’ve been giving it time for more than four years now. (Judging by some other comments, I’m not the only one who has been expecting a decline sometime in the next two months for several years now, stealing the phrasing of said comments.)
Which is to say, a little while longer won’t hurt me.
It’s an odd position to be in, but I guess not a terrible one.
I’m mostly waiting for the long slump when baby boomers start retiring in earnest. Buyer’s market. Not great for them, granted, as their investments will be worth the least right when they need them to be worth the most. I expect taxes to ramp up considerably to offset the gap this will cause.
Any reason why this or some other powdered zinc gargled in a solution wouldn’t work in place of a losenge?
If so, should dissolve it in everclear or water?
Bonus points: if the answer is everclear, how much alcohol am I likely to absorb if I gargle for like 30 seconds? I don’t want to consume alcohol for religious reasons; exceptions are made for medicines, but I would very much like to avoid mood alteration.
Zinc gluconate is insoluble in anhydrous ethanol. 95% ethanol like everclear is probably not much better.
I’m not following why you wouldn’t just eat the lozenge or consume the powder with some water or wrapped in a bit of bread or something.
Zinc is apparently only effective when it is in direct contact with the cells that are susceptible to infection. Eating it and hoping for your digestive tract to deliver enough to your nose and throat is less effective than gargling with it, apparently.
Zinc losenges are expensive and I wasn’t able to find them on amazon, so I was interested in zinc gluconate to do the same job. Sounds like gargling in water seems like the best solution, there’s only the questions of how dangerous it is and whether it would work.
I see what you did there.
The podcast I used as a source doesn’t have an answer for that.
I have no expertise of my own, but if I were to guess: I’d be a little surprised if gargling gave it enough time to deliver meaningful amounts of ionic zinc to the relevant tissues.
Yeah, you’re supposed to dissolve the lozenge for 30 minutes. Gargling for 30 seconds is nothing.
I have a dumb question about the flu vaccine. A lot of the time, it gets criticized for not being matched to the dominant strains. Isn’t this inevitable? If the flu vaccine were perfectly matched to what the dominant strains were going to be, then wouldn’t that automatically make something else the dominant strain?
Plenty of people don’t get vaccinated and the effectiveness is 40-60%, so I think that the vaccinations are simply not effective enough for that.
The flu vaccine is developed a few months prior according to the dominant strains on the other hemisphere, during their flu season. But that is not a guarantee that it will catch all the strains on your hemisphere.
+1
They have to guess the strains that will be in the flu vaccine something like 6 months in advance, so they have time to produce it.
[Disclaimer: I’m an interested amateur–there are real experts here who I hope will correct me if I get something wrong.]
Influenza is an enveloped single-stranded RNA virus. “RNA virus” means its genetic material is carried in a single strand of RNA, not a double strand of DNA like living cells use, and that matters because RNA replication is a lot more error-prone than DNA replication in our cells. “Enveloped” means that the virus has its RNA and some enzymes packaged inside a protein shell, and then it has a membrane wrapped around it that looks like our cell membranes (and I think are stolen from infected cells’ membranes on the way out).
Some pieces of the virus stick out of the envelope–these parts have to bump into the receptor on the right kind of cell for the virus to get inside the cell and infect it. Viruses have no cellular machinery of their own, so until they get into a cell, they’re basically inert. Once inside the cell, they hijack the cell’s own machinery to make lots of copies of themselves. The pieces that stick out are the only parts that can interact with the cell, so they’re pretty critical. They’re also the parts that antibodies can stick to, and if you have the right antibodies, then the influenza virus won’t be able to make you sick–your antibodies will stick to those sticking-out bits, gum them up to keep them from finding the right receptor and invading a susceptible cell, and also mark them for destruction by other parts of the immune system. Two bits of protein that stick out are called HA and NA, and those are the main thing the immune response targets. When you hear people talking about H1N1, that’s talking about the very broad class of HA and NA.
Over time, influenza viruses mutate (called “antigenic drift”). The versions of the virus that get clobbered by common immune responses don’t leave any offspring; the versions that evolve around existing immune responses get to infect new people (who’ve had previous versions of the flu) and spread. Sometimes, some person or animal gets two different strains of influenza at the same time, and then the segments of the RNA from the two strains can mix together–a little like sexual reproduction for viruses. That can potentially give you a huge change in antigens, so that all at once, you get a strain nobody has any immunity to. This is called “antigenic shift,” and it’s why people get freaked out about those bird flu strains that occasionally infect a human and make them very sick–if one of those humans also has a current human strain, you could get something that worked well at infecting humans but was wildly different in terms of immune response. Nobody would have any immunity to it, so lots of people would get sick all at once.
Antigenic drift and occasionally antigenic shift is why we need a new flu shot every year. There are always multiple strains circulating, and the guys making the vaccine have to take samples now and guess which strains will be widespread months later. Sometimes they just guess wrong, and the flu shot isn’t effective against any of the strains circulating.
This blog post explains the basic idea of how drift and shift work in influenza.
This CDC page explains the same idea in somewhat different language.
So an obvious question is “why does it take so long to produce a flu vaccine”? If you could produce it on a one-month timescale it would be tremendously more effective right?
My understanding is that producing vaccines faster has been an active area of research for a long time, at least going by how breathless pop-Sci articles on the topic occasionally pop up.
AIUI there are also a bunch of efforts going on to produce vaccines targeting proteins that aren’t as subject to drift and shift, so that they wouldn’t need to be recreated every year. If folks have leads on efforts of that kind that could use more resources, I’d be interested to know.
Conan reviews #19: The Phoenix on the Sword
Links to the first fifteen reviews.
#17, Beyond the Black River
#18, The Black Stranger
So begins the first Conan story published (Weird Tales, December 1932). “Oh Prince” is the addressee of a fictional lost book called the Nemedian Chronicles. The writer, the keeper of memories, is telling their ancient reader that between two big moments in the course of human events, as described by the Theosophists*, there was a whole age which, unlike Atlantis and such, no one dreams of. This was when Conan lived.
(I have to say, “with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery” is some decent prose-poetry.)
*In Theosophy’s outline of history, the Aryans – meaning all Indo-Europeans – were one of the seven human races that evolved on the continent of Atlantis before it sank. All seven evolved from one of the seven races of black people who populated Lemuria. “Secondary worlds” not having been invented by Tolkien yet, this purportedly-true fiction made a handy playground for fantasy writers like the Lovecraft circle.
Anyway, in the first act of our drama, masked conspirators skulk in the labyrinth of alleys in the capital city of Aquilonia. They just left a meeting with Ascalante, whose dusky slave mocked them after they went. For this is no mean slave, but Thoth-Amon, a famous magician of Stygia, most of whose power exists in a Ring, which he lost. Why do masters of the dark arts do that? It couldn’t be mindless imitation of Tolkien, since he’d never published a book by 1932.
The conspirators are “Volmana, the dwarfish count of Karaban; Gromel, the giant commander of the Black Legion; Dion, the fat baron of Attalus; Rinaldo, the hare-brained minstrel.”
Aye, except for Thoth-Amon, everything about this setting is so medieval European that they literally have a Rinaldo. They’ve formed a far-reaching conspiracy controlling everything from liquor smuggling to a diplomatic mission, to the effect that the barbarian usurper King Conan only has enough warriors around that 20 cutthroats will be able to sneak in and overpower them. But why does the conspiracy have a minstrel?
This is a frustrating combination of insightful and anachronistic. Traditional people believed in a Golden Age in the past, but there wasn’t a rival worldview that believed the True and Only Heaven was to exist in the future, brought about by human effort.
Next we find Conan complaining to his advisor:
If he hates wizards, why let a man named Prospero be his trusted adviser?
(Also note that with this reading order, we can see that “led Aquilonian armies to victory as a mercenary” was a tale Howard never told.)
Prospero says they should hang Rinaldo for sedition, but Conan says no:
Meanwhile, Thoth-Amon tries to get Dion to believe he’s not an ordinary slave, but a great man he should betray Ascalante with.
“Before the first man crawled out of the sea” is a technically sloppy cliche in SF and weird fiction, but this would mean Set existed and was worshiped by someone building and forgetting tombs in the Late Devonian.)
… so Thoth-Amon kills him. He uses the ring to summon a gigantic baboon demon, telling it to kill Ascalante.
Later that night, the dreaming King Conan hears a curious call he cannot ignore.
(Genesis 3:15 – this is one of only a couple times Howard goes Biblical on us. You of course remember Salome and the crucifixion, the other one.)
He meets Epemitreus the Sage, dead 1500 years, who tells him of portents “against which your sword can not aid you.” So he gives Conan a magic sword, providing the story’s title!
The last chapter begins with the conspirators and their picked men sneaking up on King Conan in the palace. They knock down his door upon reaching it, but find “not a naked man roused mazed and unarmed out of deep sleep to be butchered like a sheep, but a barbarian wide-awake and at bay, partly armored”.
Much is made of the importance of armor:
Eventually Conan would be depicted as surviving all his combats in a loincloth, but that was now and this was then. Heavily outnumbered and not in a full armored shell, “Conan himself did not hope to survive,”
The theme of Conan wanting to not kill Rinaldo continues:
One has to wonder if the Cimmerians have bards who are considered important and holy.
Then Conan’s life is saved by the mob of enemies running in fear from the baboon demon. As bid, it kills Ascalante. It then grips Conan’s arm, and “Conan felt his soul shrivel and begin to be drawn out of his body, to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in the formless chaos”.
Remembering that only magic weapons can hurt such things, he grabs the lower part of his sword that broke in the fight and stabs, which is enough to kill it. And when it dies, it completely vanishes. Some courtiers rushing to his aid think he’s delusional. He goes on about the dead sage’s ghost, which makes the high priest of Mitra cry “lord king, be silent!” It seems that everything he’s blabbing about that corridor is “one of the Mysteries, on which Mitra’s cult stands.”
This isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s short and tightly-written.
This first Conan story was a re-write of one of Howard’s King Kull stories, “By This Axe I Rule!” Kull stories had been published in Weird Tales twice, but since Howard’s Muse inspired him to write one with no supernatural element, he submitted it to Argosy and Adventure in 1929, where it was rejected. He got the idea for “an age undreamed of” and its barbarian adventurer, which he fleshed out as he revised BTAIR. As soon as he was finished, he started filling in Conan’s youth with “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”, then “The God in the Bowl” in which Thoth-Amon also figured. Then he forgot all about the character, until writing The Hour of the Dragon, in which Conan slaughters a rival cabal of Stygian priests for a MacGuffin, indifferent to the fact that he strengthened Thoth-Amon.
That’s all to say that this character was not a Conan villain. Conan never had a villain, just different antagonists. The arch-nemesis is a rule of writing an adventure series that hadn’t solidified yet. How many times did Conan Doyle write Sherlock Holmes trying to stop the master criminal Moriarty? Twice?
Conan reviews #19: The Phoenix on the Sword
Older review links here.
So begins the first Conan story published (Weird Tales, December 1932). “Oh Prince” is the addressee of a fictional lost book called the Nemedian Chronicles. The writer, the keeper of memories, is telling their ancient reader that between two big moments in the course of human events, as described by the Theosophists*, there was a whole age which, unlike Atlantis and such, no one dreams of. This was when Conan lived.
(I have to say, “with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery” is some decent prose-poetry.)
*In Theosophy’s outline of history, the Aryans – meaning all Indo-Europeans – were one of the seven human races that evolved on the continent of Atlantis before it sank. All seven evolved from one of the seven races of black people who populated Lemuria. “Secondary worlds” not having been invented by Tolkien yet, this purportedly-true fiction made a handy playground for fantasy writers like the Lovecraft circle.
Anyway, in the first act of our drama, masked conspirators skulk in the labyrinth of alleys in the capital city of Aquilonia. They just left a meeting with Ascalante, whose dusky slave mocked them after they went. For this is no mean slave, but Thoth-Amon, a famous magician of Stygia, most of whose power exists in a Ring, which he lost. Why do masters of the dark arts do that? It couldn’t be mindless imitation of Tolkien, since he’d never published a book by 1932.
The conspirators are “Volmana, the dwarfish count of Karaban; Gromel, the giant commander of the Black Legion; Dion, the fat baron of Attalus; Rinaldo, the hare-brained minstrel.”
Aye, except for Thoth-Amon, everything about this setting is so medieval European that they literally have a Rinaldo. They’ve formed a far-reaching conspiracy controlling everything from liquor smuggling to a diplomatic mission, to the effect that the barbarian usurper King Conan only has enough warriors around that 20 cutthroats will be able to sneak in and overpower them. But why does the conspiracy have a minstrel?
This is a frustrating combination of insightful and anachronistic. Traditional people believed in a Golden Age in the past, but there wasn’t a rival worldview that believed the True and Only Heaven was to exist in the future, brought about by human effort.
Next we find Conan complaining to his advisor:
If he hates wizards, why let a man named Prospero be his trusted adviser?
(Also note that with this reading order, we can see that “led Aquilonian armies to victory as a mercenary” was a tale Howard never told.)
Prospero says they should hang Rinaldo for sedition, but Conan says no:
Meanwhile, Thoth-Amon tries to get Dion to believe he’s not an ordinary slave, but a great man he should betray Ascalante with.
“Before the first man crawled out of the sea” is a technically sloppy cliche in SF and weird fiction, but this would mean Set existed and was worshiped by someone building and forgetting tombs in the Late Devonian.)
… so Thoth-Amon kills him. He uses the ring to summon a gigantic baboon demon, telling it to kill Ascalante.
Later that night, the dreaming King Conan hears a curious call he cannot ignore.
(Genesis 3:15 – this is one of only a couple times Howard goes Biblical on us. You of course remember Salome and the crucifixion, the other one.)
He meets Epemitreus the Sage, dead 1500 years, who tells him of portents “against which your sword can not aid you.” So he gives Conan a magic sword, providing the story’s title!
The last chapter begins with the conspirators and their picked men sneaking up on King Conan in the palace. They knock down his door upon reaching it, but find “not a naked man roused mazed and unarmed out of deep sleep to be butchered like a sheep, but a barbarian wide-awake and at bay, partly armored”.
Much is made of the importance of armor:
Eventually Conan would be depicted as surviving all his combats in a loincloth, but that was now and this was then. Heavily outnumbered and not in a full armored shell, “Conan himself did not hope to survive,”
The theme of Conan wanting to not kill Rinaldo continues:
One has to wonder if the Cimmerians have bards who are considered important and holy.
Then Conan’s life is saved by the mob of enemies running in fear from the baboon demon. As bid, it kills Ascalante. It then grips Conan’s arm, and “Conan felt his soul shrivel and begin to be drawn out of his body, to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in the formless chaos”.
Remembering that only magic weapons can hurt such things, he grabs the lower part of his sword that broke in the fight and stabs, which is enough to kill it. And when it dies, it completely vanishes. Some courtiers rushing to his aid think he’s delusional. He goes on about the dead sage’s ghost, which makes the high priest of Mitra cry “lord king, be silent!” It seems that everything he’s blabbing about that corridor is “one of the Mysteries, on which Mitra’s cult stands.”
This isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s short and tightly-written.
This first Conan story was a re-write of one of Howard’s King Kull stories, “By This Axe I Rule!” Kull stories had been published in Weird Tales twice, but since Howard’s Muse inspired him to write one with no supernatural element, he submitted it to Argosy and Adventure in 1929, where it was rejected. He got the idea for “an age undreamed of” and its barbarian adventurer, which he fleshed out as he revised BTAIR. As soon as he was finished, he started filling in Conan’s youth with “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”, then “The God in the Bowl” in which Thoth-Amon also figured. Then he forgot all about the character, until writing The Hour of the Dragon, in which Conan slaughters a rival cabal of Stygian priests for a MacGuffin, indifferent to the fact that he strengthened Thoth-Amon.
That’s all to say that this character was not a Conan villain. Conan never had a villain, just different antagonists. The arch-nemesis is a rule of writing an adventure series that hadn’t solidified yet. How many times did Conan Doyle write Sherlock Holmes trying to stop the master criminal Moriarty? Twice?
I don’t get it, either. When I asked a friend what purpose the ring served him, other than a convenient means for the heroes to deprive Sauron of his power, he explained that the ring does serve to focus or magnify Sauron’s power in other ways. I suppose the same is true of Thoth-Amon, and he couldn’t do much before he’d crafted a ring.
The stuff about Rinaldo living eternal in memory is funny, because this is a prehistoric age. It’s Conan who is “remembered,” and none of Rinaldo’s poetry makes the cut; writers enjoy crafting ironies like that, don’t they. Cimmerians might, anyway, have something like skalds? Wrong culture, but I bet they’d fit right in.
I dunno, but I look forward to Deiseach weighing in.
This was one of the first Conan stories I read, and I like it.
But it doesn’t sound like Thoth actually created this ring? He found it, used it, and somehow lost it. Powerful but cursed rings are common in mythology, most famously the Ring of the Niebelung.
Ah yes, he said he found it. I remembered somehow that he had made it.
… as are non-cursed rings good for casting just one spell. The ring of Gyges was said to have belonged to a king so ancient that he’d been forgotten by circa 690 BC, when an earthquake revealed a cave in a mountainside that gave access to his tomb.
That artifacts like the ring of Gyges had no origin story and Tolkien came up with an elaborate origin story for a bunch of magic rings makes me wonder if he was intending to fill in details of the real world’s mythic history, ignoring that confused “secondary world” talk.
Odin’s ring, Draupnir, which every night spawns nine similar golden rings, but presumably without the magic properties. (Or we wouldn’t have to talk about paperclip maximizers)
There would be no space left for humans on Midgard, nor for any other animals; nay plants could barely grow in the cracks between the maximized number of magic rings piled on the ground. It would be… Ringworld.
This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a dripper.
Tolkien was pretty clear about what Sauron got from the One Ring: it gave him the ability to dominate and control the bearers of all the other Great Rings.
It was his original super-villain scheme; Sauron made a bunch of Rings which he distributed to the rulers of the men, the dwarves, and the elves. But he built a security backdoor into them, making the vulnerable to the master of the One Ring To Rule Them All. Plan only failed because some of the ring-bearers figured it out before he was ready to act, and stopped wearing their rings until he was defeated and separated from the One Ring.
Also seems to have given him no-fooling immortality so long as the Ring existed, which is pretty useful.
How many times did Conan Doyle write Sherlock Holmes trying to stop the master criminal Moriarty? Twice?
This is complicated by the slightly messed-up internal chronologies of the stories, but basically Doyle wanted to kill off Holmes so, to send him out with a bang, he introduced his Arch-Nemesis, Professor Moriarty, in the story “The Final Problem”. This is the first time Watson or the readers ever hears the name of the master-criminal who, we are told, has been hiding in the shadows directing the London underworld for years.
Great, Doyle kills off his Great Detective and Arch-Nemesis in one go, everything is fine to go ahead with what he considers his real writing career (historical novels). Except the general public don’t want his historical novels, they want the return of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle eventually gives in for several reasons and Holmes comes back from the dead. But now that it’s been established that there is (or was) a master-criminal etc. etc. operating all the time, there’s now a new character that Doyle can use.
So when writing other stories set after Holmes’ return, Moriarty is mentioned (but not seen or interacted with) as having done such-and-such a thing in the past. There is one novel, “The Valley of Fear”, which is set before Holmes’ ‘death’ (but written afterwards) where Moriarty is alive and in opposition to Holmes, but the two never meet face-to-face and all Moriarty’s work is done by agents.
RE: the magic ring, such items are a staple of folklore and mythology, so little wonder they carried over into fantasy. No sorcerer or wizard worth his salt is without his talismans and periapts! Thoth-Amon found the ring in a lost tomb, and plainly it is meant to be something from out of the past of the non-human dominant species, a repository and channel of vast power which ultimately comes from the Serpent-God Set. Since losing it seems to mean Thoth-Amon lost all his power (and ended up as a slave), either he was only a mediocre sorcerer to begin with and relied too much on the power of the Ring to gain supremacy, or using it comes with a price: you get great power but your own power becomes tied up with it, so lose it and you lose everything.
Re: Sauron and the Ring, for the purpose of the story he needed some kind of weakness to enable him to be overcome, so the traditional external life source worked there – see for example the story of Koschei the Deathless, where “He hides his soul inside nested objects to protect it. For example, the soul may be inside in a needle, which is in an egg, which is in a duck, which attempts to fly off if anyone tries to capture it.” The advantage there is if, for instance, some barbarian in a silk loincloth tries to chop your head off, you don’t stay dead. The disadvantage there is if the barbarian finds your external life and kills the duck, crushes the egg, and destroys the needle, you die and stay dead 🙂
Inside the story, it gets complicated. Sauron creates the One Ring as the master-ring to rule over the other magical rings, which mean that he can in turn rule over the wearers of those rings. It backs up and amplifies his own power, so that while wearing it he is indestructible. The disadvantage, of course, is that if the Ring is lost or destroyed, he too will lose all his power – but like all sorcerers and others who use such items, he is over-confident in his abilities and never considers that anyone will be able to defeat him or get near enough to take the Ring.
It is a matter of power exchange – to be able to get control of the other rings, Sauron has to channel a large amount of his own original power into the Ring to form that linkage. Thus, some of his power (a lot of it) is now external to him and fixed in the Ring. In a sense, it is now lost to him. This is risky, but as said, plainly he considers that he can manage the risk – who is ever going to be strong enough to even get near to him, much less defeat him and take the Ring? To quote a chunk from “The History of Middle-Earth: Morgoth’s Ring”:
Ask and you shall receive!
Thank you for the comprehensive answer. I certainly understood that the Ring allowed Sauron to master the rulers he gave the rings to (not altogether successfully, though he did get the nine ringwraiths out of it), but I figured there had to be more to it than that. If I read you right here,
there was a little more to it, then, and my friend was right.
And holy cow Morgoth sounds like a problem.
there was a little more to it, then, and my friend was right.
And holy cow Morgoth sounds like a problem.
Oh yeah, Morgoth is the original Big Bad in the legendarium and a real pain to get rid of (and as Tolkien explains, can never be really totally ‘gotten rid of’). He’s Lucifer to the max 🙂
Sauron is a servant of his who decides to give himself a promotion when the Boss is eventually taken out, and he is lesser in every way (though still a big nuisance). The thing about Sauron, Morgoth and the rest of the Valar is that they are spirits, so to have any effect on the physical plane they have to ‘incarnate’ in some form (that’s why the Wizards are in the form of old mortal Men), create a physical body out of the elements of the world (doesn’t necessarily have to be a human body, though; Yavanna the Goddess of the Earth can be a woman or a tree: “Her usual form was that of a tall woman robed in green. She has also been seen in the form of a tall tree growing from the waters of Ulmo to the winds of Manwe spilling golden dew from her branches, which made the barren earth green with corn”). That’s why Sauron put so much of his (spirit-form) power into the Ring; it gives him not alone control over the other Rings and is a back-up reservoir of his power but it also acts as an anchor in the physical world for him – so even when overthrown the first time, he could still come back from being a spirit because the Ring was in existence and gave him a focus to concentrate on while he healed up and regained his power in the mortal plane again until he took on a new body (the Necromancer in Dol Guldur). That’s why the One Ring is a double-edged sword: it’s dangerous and risky to sink so much of his power into it because that separates that power from him, but it also means that if he is driven out of the body, he has a point of attachment he can return to, and unless the Ring is unmade, he can never be completely defeated.
Hence the title The Lord of the Rings or How the Anglo-Saxons Were so Good They Defeated Satan Jr. When They Were Still Pagan 😛
Edit: Hrm, actually the hobbits weren’t Anglo. They had their own language in the Appendix which Tolkien says he translated into archaic English. Were the Rohirrim literal Germanic speakers or just a second anthropological equivalent of Anglo-Saxons?
@Let Maistre Chat > “…Were the Rohirrim literal Germanic speakers or just a second anthropological equivalent of Anglo-Saxons?”
Ango-Saxon Cossacks somehow!
Were the Rohirrim literal Germanic speakers or just a second anthropological equivalent of Anglo-Saxons?
Definitely Anglo-Saxon; excerpts below from a few letters of Tolkien (he got a little testy with somebody trying to do some amateur philology on the names with wild guessing):
@Deiseach:
See, I read that as saying that as “not literal prehistoric Germanic speakers. The negative answer would of course be necessary if he was intending the Rohirrim to exist 5,000 years ago. “Westron” of such a date would basically be PIE if it was associated with domestic horse owners.
You mean PIE wasn’t actually associated with domestic horse owners?
I quite liked this article from a friend entitled “Wash your hands, but also…” about some semi-out of the box ways to handle the oncoming 2019-nCoV pandemic.
It seems like over the past few weeks I saw a lot of people rush to write personal articles basically rehashing the same common sense advice (“Wash your hands!” “Avoid large crowds!” “Don’t mamabird food into your friend’s mouth!”).
The idea of this one, in contrast, is to present with some interesting ideas to help flatten the curve of the pandemic. Some examples he gives:
– Make carrying visible hand sanitizer into a fashion statement. Give out screen disenfectant as a gift.
– Take precautions to avoid having to go to the hospital for other reasons (and thus take up valuable bedspace)
– Think about your social distancing plan before you actually implement it.
– Prepare to take care of others close to you that might get sick.
Ramp up surgical mask production and make it a social norm that walking around in public unmasked when you’re coughing/sneezing is like walking around in public smelling bad due to several days without bathing.
Yes, please!
Of all of the things which Japan’s terrible work culture has normalized, this is the one thing I know of that I’d like to see adopted here.
Trigger warning: horrible things happening to babies
Pain in babies
According to this Wikipedia article, until the 80s scientists believed that babies don’t feel pain. Therefore doctors performed surgeries on babies without anaesthesia.
Can anyone confirm if ot is true? Do you know how it could happen?
(If it is true, I would nominate it as a pretty horrible Science Failure.)
I definitely heard this as an anecdote in the 80s, and (not being as properly jaded as I am now) wondered how they measured it.
Not only do they feel pain, they remember it as well. When our son was 3 months old he had to have a colonoscopy, which they did without anaesthesia as the doctors didn’t want to use a general anaesthetic. He would scream his head off if he saw anyone in a white coat for years afterward.
I’m not 100% sure I don’t feel some sympathy for the doctors here, at least to a certain point in time. If there’s an ability mismatch between surgery and anesthesia where we are able to do life-saving procedures on babies but don’t a great ability to completely block their pain, it makes a lot more sense to comfort parents and the surgeon by saying babies don’t feel pain in the same way.
To the extent this slowed down developing proper anesthesia for infants it’s bad, but otherwise it’s a situation where either A. The baby dies B. The baby lives, but the parents and surgeon feel wracking guilt forever or C. The baby lives, the parents feel no guilt, and the surgeon feels less guilt. I’ll usually choose C. in this situation.
Considering the Wikipedia page states that “Infant Jeffrey Lawson underwent open heart surgery in 1985. His mother, Jill R. Lawson, subsequently discovered that he had been operated on without any anaesthesia, other than a muscle relaxant. She started a vigorous awareness campaign[39] which created such a public, and medical, reaction that by 1987[40] medical opinion had come full circle.”, i would argue that it appears that C, in this case, was always bad, since it’s unlikely that 2 years was enough for medicine to evolve enough for infant anesthetic to be developed. Taken at face value, it simply appears that pain relief was doable, and just wasn’t done until after this incident, meaning that this was done for no real medical reason besides belief.
Which, for me, would perhaps make this one of, if not the, worst thing to ever happen in human history.
I’m not sure your conclusion follows based on what you are presenting – it doesn’t say infant anesthesia was suddenly available at that time, just that public opinion changed on the need for it. Even if it was available in 1985, that doesn’t mean it was safe before it.
That’s why I said “at least to a certain point in time”. Once we were able to figure out proper non-harmful dosing and weren’t, it’s pretty bad. If that “once” is “all the times we did surgery on babies ever” then it was bad the whole time; if it was “since the 1980’s” then it wasn’t as bad before that and arguably was a necessity.
Believe me that I don’t want babies being tortured, but I also don’t want a pile of dead babies. If I’m going to condemn doctors as doing the worst thing in human history as you suggest, I for sure want to know all the details on how infant anesthesia works first.
I mean, i wouldn’t say i condemn them, it can be unequivocally bad without the doctors being knowing malicious. But that’s a fair point, the Wikipedia article is very light on citations so it’s unclear to what extent anesthetic was available and developed during this time. As not an anesthesiologist i can’t say with any certainty how infant anesthetic works differently from adult, but my reading of that quote was such that i struggle to imagine people suddenly changing their mind on anesthetic being unnecessary, but still continuing to not use it since the technology was not available. That seems like something that would have been a huge deal, since knowingly inflicting a huuuuge amount of pain on children to save lives for a few years until medicine caught up should have left a larger cultural mark. But then again so should have the entire history of this event and yet here we are.
And don’t get me wrong – I, nearly 90% man, cried the other day because I can’t work at Phoenix Children’s Hospital as a secretary and help all the little babies by proxy. If this was unnecessary I’m on the same page with you for the entire time it was unnecessary.
Derrida famously said something like, I wrote confusingly because nobody in France would take you seriously if you wrote clearly.
Maybe obscurantism will rise again, but for a different reason: if, instead of a short, clear blog post, you write a long, dense book, where every interesting sentence is comprised of neologisms three definitions deep, you make it difficult for somebody to screenshot a paragraph out of context for outrage points.
David Reich has already admitted how ubiquitous this is among geneticists in his book Who We Are and How We Got Here. (Ironically enough) I can’t say more without breaking the culture war rule. It’s probably more common than you think.
That sounds interesting. Would you mind elaborating on the next fractional thread?
I think I remember seeing that claim attributed to Foucault by way of Searle rather than to Derrida.
More directly related to your main point I am reminded a bit by the following remarks from C.S. Perice
You’re trafficking in a classic trope of anti-intellectualism; some things are complicated, some things are hard, and not everything can be distilled down to the “gist” without severely compromising the message.
The greater the complexity, the harder it is for flaws or weaknesses to be evident. Yet on the other hand, simplifying away important details misrepresents something that is actually complex, as being simpler.
This is why Einstein said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
It’s actually possible for writing to at the same time be too simple (by leaving out necessary detail) and too complex (by adding useless/deceptive/vague/etc crap that merely makes the flaws hard to spot).
The rejection of obscurantism is for having the wrong kind of complexity.
Maybe so, but consider Feynman’s QED, which presents the essentials of an extremely complicated and counterintuitive subject in terse and lucid prose, in a form which can be understood by most reasonably scientifically/mathematically conversant adults: certainly anyone who majored in a STEM subject in college, probably just anyone who paid attention in high school math and physics.
I’m willing to believe that most intellectuals in the famously jargon-heavy humanities subjects aren’t nearly as good at communication as Feynman, and therefore often fail badly in good-faith attempts to bring across their ideas with similar lucidity. I’m *not* willing to believe that the ideas they have to bring across are harder or more complicated than quantum electrodynamics.
It was not Derrida, but Foucault, and the information is not first-hand. See this link, which contains the original claim.
Well ex hypothesi if Foucault said so it wouldn’t be in so many words.
Anyone have a thumbnail portrait of how YouTube authors and Twitch streamers make money? It seems to be a mix of ad revenue, direct sponsorship by viewers (often through Patreon), product promotion, and affinity merchandise sales. But how much from each, and how do the numbers scale with the size of the audience?
That surely varies greatly by channel, especially as some are banned from getting ad revenue. Even the earnings from ads can vary greatly, because some ads pay better than other ads. Normal figures seem to run between $0.25 per 1,000 views and $5 per 1,000 views.
That reminds me of JdG, who started doing sponsored promotions at the beginning of each video because spurious copyright claims kept demonitzing his videos.
One Streamer/Youtuber I watch semi-regularly, who gets something like 6-8k views on his YT videos, said recently he put’s around 20 workhours in an one hour video and get’s around 1$/hour in ad revenue.
He also calculated that an youtuber needs at least 200k active follower, for the algorithm producing enough reach to make a living wage from ad revenue alone, as the algorithm only presents new videos only to a fratcion of even the active followers at a time, and only presents it to more people when the retention rate is high enough.
Sadly patreon does not revieal the amount a content-creator makes anymore, so I can’t say how much it is. But said Youtuber and his Editor both said that an recent boost in patreon-patrons are the reason why they could keep up the channel.
Financial advice youtuber breaks down all his income streams related to his channel. He breaks out ad revenue, sponsorships, premium content, etc. Extremely honest and informative.
The big insight I got from him that I didn’t know was that different types of channels get different compensation levels. He gets quite a premium for ads on his videos because advertisers are very interested in reaching the sorts of people who watch “how to invest in real estate” type videos.
The vast majority don’t.
There are a few pursuing an exit strategy where the money comes later: for example, later getting a high paying salary hosting a show that spun out of their YT for example.
For the rest, it’s a combination of ad share, embedded ads, and secondary income, particularly for people in less profitable niches. If you can get 100,000 views from high net worth businesspeople per video you might legitimately pull down six figures from ad share each video. If you’re a mommy blog, less so.
Each channel has a somewhat different mix. “Edgy” channels tend to rely almost exclusively on secondary income like patreon or selling merch. Successful channels in low profit verticals tend to use embedded ads more. Etc.
Each video? That seems way too high.
I agree with your overall point though. Way more people who want to be rockstars than rockstars.
That’s an admittedly extreme case. But if you could get 100,000 people from houses where each person earns at least six figures to watch each video for at least ten minutes? Yes, each video would make you that much.
How many people have achieved that? No one, as far as I know.
Video from 2015 from a lower-level Youtuber
Youtube has adjusted its algorithm and ratios multiple times since then so that the content creators make less ad revenue (both from less views and less from each view).
Shingeki no Kyojin/Attack on Titan Discussion Thread
This thread will contain manga spoilers for Shingeki no Kyojin up through chapter 127. If you are not up to date on the manga, don’t read this thread. Go read SnK instead; it’s great.
Spoilers — i.e., most of the post — will be written in rot13. For anyone unfamiliar, you can use rot13.com to decode them.
Welcome, fellow SnK fans of SSC who probably exist, hopefully! How you doin’?
Ernql sbe gur raq bs gur jbeyq?
N srj dhrfgvbaf, gb fgneg guvatf bss:
– Jung qb lbh guvax bs gur dhnyvgl bs gur znatn nf n jubyr? Qb lbh guvax vg’f tbar hc bire gvzr? Tbar qbja? Mvt-mnttrq?
V guvax gur jevgvat jnf snagnfgvp evtug sebz gur fgneg, ohg unf trarenyyl tbggra zber naq zber vzcerffvir nf gur fgbel jrag ba.
– Yrg’f gnyx nobhg gur onfrzrag erirny. (Vg’f byq arjf ng guvf cbvag, boivbhfyl, ohg fvapr NSNVX gurer’f orra ab qvfphffvba bs gur frevrf urer orsber, vg’f jbegu qvfphffvat.) Qvq nalbar frr vg pbzvat? Qb lbh guvax vg fngvfsnpgbevyl shysvyyrq gur cebzvfrf frg hc ol gur rneyvre cnegf bs gur frevrf?
V pbafvqre gur onfrzrag gb or vaperqvoyl havdhr. Jr unir n fgbel gung fgnegrq bss jvgu n irel pbzcryyvat naq nyy-rapbzcnffvat bagbybtvpny zlfgrel, naq cenpgvpnyyl rirel ovg bs arj vasbezngvba jr tbg whfg envfrq arj dhrfgvbaf. Guvf fgngr bs nssnvef jrag ba sebz puncgre 1, va 2009, gb puncgre 86, va 2016. Gung’f n zlfgrel xrcg bcra sbe rvtugl-fvk puncgref naq frira ragver lrnef.
Naq jura jr svanyyl tbg gur erirny, gjb guvatf nobhg vg jrer cerggl nznmvat: bar, onfvpnyyl ab bar unq cerqvpgrq vg gb nal zrnavatshy rkgrag; naq gjb, vg jnfa’g n yrgqbja. V qba’g guvax V’ir rire frra nalbar qb gung orsber — abg jvgu fhpu n uhtr zlfgrel, grnfrq sbe fhpu n ybat gvzr.
– Jung’f lbhe ivrj bs gur eriryngvbaf jr’ir tbggra fvapr gur onfrzrag? Ubarfgyl, ng gur gvzr, V svtherq jr’q onfvpnyyl frra nyy gur ovt nafjref, naq gur erfg bs gur fgbel jbhyq or nobhg ubj guvatf cynlrq bhg. Ohg, ab, jr whfg xrrc trggvat zber gjvfgf, naq gur frggvat whfg xrrcf trggvat jrveqre naq jrveqre.
V’z n ovt sna bs gur pbagvahvat zvaq-fperj, naq V’z irel vzcerffrq ol ubj pyrneyl cynaarq gurfr arj erirnyf jrer jvgubhg orvat boivbhf nurnq bs gvzr, ohg ubj nobhg lbh?
– Jung qb lbh guvax bs pheerag riragf va gur znatn? Qb lbh guvax Rera’f npgvbaf ner whfgvsvrq, be abg? (V zrna, V’z cerggl fher bs jung gur pbafrafhf urer vf tbvat gb or, ohg V gubhtug V’q nfx.)
– Qb lbh unir nal vqrnf nobhg ubj gur fgbel jvyy raq? Qb lbh oryvrir Nezva naq pbzcnal jvyy fhpprrq va fgbccvat Rera, be jvyy gur bhgfvqr jbeyq or qrfgeblrq? (Be zvtug gur Ehzoyvat or fgbccrq ol fbzr bgure zrnaf?) Vs gur Ehzoyvat vf fgbccrq, jvyy guvf zrna rkgvapgvba sbe Cnenqvf, be jvyy n zber crnprshy fbyhgvba or sbhaq?
– Jung, vs nalguvat, qb lbh guvax gur Cnenqvfvnaf pbhyq unir qbar gb cerirag gur fvghngvba gung’f abj pbzr gb cnff? Qb lbh guvax gur svsgl-lrne qrgreerapr bcgvba zvtug unir jbexrq? Jbhyq Mrxr’f fgrevyvmngvba cyna or na npprcgnoyr genqrbss? Qb lbh guvax gurer’f fbzrguvat abobql va-fgbel gubhtug bs?
V erpragyl pnzr hc jvgu n gurbel ertneqvat guvf — unys ulcbgurgvpny, unys raqvat gurbel — juvpu fhttrfgf gung vg zvtug or cbffvoyr gb fvzcyl hcybnq gur ragver Ryqvna cbchyngvba vagb gur Cnguf ernyz, naq rvgure unir gurz yvir gurer vaqrsvavgryl, be zbir gurz sbejneq va gvzr naq ervagrtengr vagb gur erny jbeyq ng n cbvag jura gur Gvgnaf ner ab ybatre eryrinag. V qvq n jevgr-hc nobhg guvf ba gur FaX fhoerqqvg, urer:
link text
Vg tbg n cerggl puvyyl erfcbafr ba Erqqvg; V’z phevbhf jung crbcyr urer zvtug guvax bs vg. Fvapr cbfgvat gung V’ir ernyvmrq gung gur frevrf’ zbgvs bs rkcybevat gur jbeyq cebonoyl znxr guvf bcgvba yrff yvxryl nf n erfbyhgvba sbe gur frevrf, hayrff fbzrguvat jrveq vf qbar jvgu gung gurzr.
Naljnl, V ubcr gb frr na vagrerfgvat qvfphffvba urer. Vs gur erfcbafr vf tbbq, V zvtug pbagvahr gb znxr qvfphffvba cbfgf jvgu rnpu arj puncgre.
(As a side note, is there any possibility of SSC getting spoiler functionality? Am I the only one who finds dealing with rot13 kind of tedious?)
Convid19 virus what about the people that work in the gabarge sector what are the chances of getting this virus and what measures are in place for it. Just a thought to put out to people to see how this would spread in this sector.
I don’t know anything about garbage collection directly, but my guess is that garbage collectors already take some severe precautions against infection, given that they are working with a lot of infection vectors. Now it may be that garbage doesn’t transmit viruses very well, and instead just provides a breeding ground for fungi and bacteria that can infect wounds, so that garbage collector precautions might only involve avoiding cuts while working. But it does seem that whatever is done to protect garbage collectors during cold and flu season will protect them similarly against the novel coronavirus. (But perhaps garbage collectors just live with a higher than average level of flu infection?)
Has anyone else found that Scott’s usually great book reviews end up taking some enjoyment out of actually reading the books in question?
I recently read a book that was reviewed on this site (I won’t say which because I don’t want to see critical of the book or the author) and left feeling quite disappointed. Not that the book was bad, or that it didn’t have valuable insights. Just that I didn’t really learn anything new that wasn’t already well covered in Scott’s review (and the comments following).
@Matt M >
I read Albion’s Seed, On the Road, (years before discovering the blog), and Bullshit Jobs (a few weeks before his review) before reading Scott’s reviews, I can’t remember reading anything else he reviewed except some Robert Conquest stuff on the Bolsheviks (which I’m not sure if they were the same since Conquest did a lot of books on the topic).
I’m glad I read Seed and Jobs first, I think reading Scott’s reviews first would rob me of the desire to read further as I would’ve felt I “got the gist” (whicg his reviews do give, but there’s more to the books).
His review of On the Road may have been beneficial so that I would’ve skipped it, as I remember it there’s a few poetic passages, but it was pretty much was what Scott said, and it’s popularity is baffling (and a bit frightening, like all the fans of the Scarface remake).
Does a Bullshit Jobs review by Scott exist? I would very much want to read it, but I don’t think it ever appeared on this blog, and I haven’t managed to find it through Google either.
@Hoopdawg,
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/29/bullst-jobs-part-1-of-∞/
But it seemed to me to be more of a riff on the original essay rather than a review of the full published book, see my post on that
I read “The Secret of Our Success” after reading Scott’s review and found it enjoyable. (But then, that might partly be because the discussion had led me to think I’d enjoy it less for ideological reasons.)
I’m thinking of taking advantage of the low airfares to take a trip in the next two months, but I don’t want to get coronavirus during transit. What precautions should I take?
This is what I have so far:
-Wear an N95 mask at all times at the airports and in the plane
-Frequently wash my hands and use hand sanitizer
-Use small spray bottle of Lysol to sterilize the arm rests and tray table of my plane seat.
-Bring a big plastic trashbag. After leaving the airport, put the clothes I was wearing into the bag and seal it.
-After leaving the airport, also spray down my luggage with Lysol.
How effective will these precautions be, and why?
Should I add anything?
If you’re wearing an N95 mask, you should be wearing goggles over your eyes too. The virus can get in through the eyes as well. And, of course, don’t actually touch your face.
It seems to me like this is a “defect” strategy, and my vote for you to reconsider your travel plans entirely.
To quantify this, my very rough back of the envelope estimates are that each additional person infected with the virus today is likely to lead to an additional 100 or so extra people who get infected in the next couple months (at which point the virus will hopefully taper off due to warmer weather in the northern hemisphere, but that’s not certain).
I think the death rate will wind up being around 1%, so even if you’re not worried about contracting the virus yourself, if you get it today I expect that on average you can expect 1 other person (probably an older person) to die as a result (and many others to have an unpleasant illness).
Of course, if you take steps to limit your contact with others more than average you can mitigate this.
+1
Make sure that spray bottle is small enough or you’re taking it nowhere near the plane. Any plan you make, you should def check in advance that airport security/the airline won’t be causing problems.
A related question for everyone…
Is it possible/likely that this year we will see a net reduction in total deaths due to flu because of the precautions around Coronavirus?
IOW, is it possible that, all in, this will be one of the safest years, rather than the riskiest?
Just asking.
We might also see a reduction in flue deaths because the corona kills the most vulnerable first.
Total mortality for the year would be an interesting statistic.
Yeah, an awesome statistic would be weekly, monthly and YTD total flu deaths this year vs the last three year average.
Any predictions of whether the total number will be going up a lot? A little? Or down?
From what Vincent Racceniello said on TWIV awhile back, they estimate total flu deaths by looking at excess pneumonia deaths during flu season. So I think it’s going to be quite an exercise to determine whether the excess pneumonia deaths this year are COVID-19 or flu on patients they don’t test, and anyone who’s already dead is definitely not getting a test while tests are scarce.
I doubt it. Coronavirus is more deadly than the flu, so I expect more people will die on net, not less. Flu deadliness also seems to vary pretty widely from year to year due to different strains, so I think you will have a hard time detecting a difference unless, as Randy suggests, coronavirus kills everyone that flu would have taken.
The reason why we might end up with fewer deaths total is if the spike in deaths in January to March encourages people to take precautions that bring total deaths from the new disease below flu levels, while also bringing flu deaths for the year near zero.
I don’t know if it’s safer, but it’s a very convenient three months. I can go to a doctor, and there’s soap in the guest bathrooms. Before this year, there has never been soap in any bathrooms in these two clinics during the twelve years that I’ve been visiting them. It’s luxury from my dreams coming true.
Personally it doesn’t work differently for pain.
If I understand Buddhism correctly, suffering arises from something like a state of cognitive dissonance, in which the suffering from pain is more about expectations of not being in pain, rather than from the pain itself.
I suspect that is on the right track, but maybe not quite correct, or maybe misleading in some important ways; we can say we expect it to hurt when we hit our thumb with a hammer, so why do we suffer then? I’d say that is the wrong kind of expectation, but don’t know how to express that more specifically.
Probably has more to do with how we are definite the words “pain” and “suffer”. I would describe hitting myself in the thumb with a hammer to definitely be painful, but I wouldn’t call it any kind of “suffering”.
For me it’s like there’s a continuum from discomfort -> pain -> suffering. Somewhere along that spectrum it seems like there’s a discontinuity where my metric goes from “avoiding not bad, eliminating probably bad/impossible” to “this is terrible and should never happen ever”. I think being uncomfortably cold/hot on occasion is probably good, or at least neutral. I think having a loved one die shouldn’t be something people have to experience. Somewhere between the two there’s an inversion point.
Are you looking specifically for writings/more professional explanations on the topic, or more of a reasoning in general? I unfortunately don’t know any for the former, but may be able to explain my reasoning on it as an individual.
To keep it short, in my view of this, the reason we don’t have charitable attempts to get wild animals laid but do have ones to relieve animal suffering is that pain is the root of all negatives. The reason a (human at least), desires to mate is that they feel uncomfortable and a form of pain when they do not.
For the main question as to why pain qualia should be morally relevant, or why relieving suffering is good, i think (i’m not good at interpreting his work) Eliezer has spoken about this to some extent. My answer is that simply, as a human i can only tell you what i experience and know consciously. Any qualia can be argued to be good or bad since its a philosophical problem, there is not real method to prove it either way. But when i look into myself and ask the stone tablet of the universe, as Eliezer says, “is pain good?” i get back a resounding and unequivocal NO. I think that understanding and feeling that knowledge is one of the aspects of being human. It’s kind of testable? Try being in some pain, like real serious terribly awful pain, for as long as you can stand, and then some. In my experiences of this, i would say that it is bad, and shouldn’t happen to anyone.
Of course, the counter augment to this would be that something can feel bad but still be good, but for a very base level qualia like this, perhaps one of the lowest level ones, i personally go with what i instinctively know.
Apologies in advance if I’m not interpreting your question right, or I’m explaining it badly.
I really think it’s worth separating pain from suffering in these discussions, because pain is certainly a good qualia to have access to, as any leper would tell you. The problem is pain that does not point to a problem that can be resolved.
I like Eliezer’s take on it:
Pain can be a lot more painful than pleasure is pleasant. My yearning for chocolate also does not constrain my options and capabilities to the extent that debiliating pain can – regardless of my previous convictions I may not be able to think or act rationally, other than frantically trying to make the pain stop. I guess e.g. opioid cravings are an exception, but then we’re splitting hairs about what exactly is and isn’t pain.
Our favorite lobster man is also, AFAIK, basing his own moral system on the obvious negative value of pain and suffering, though I can’t find a good quote. Also he’s not a consequentialist by a long shot.
It’s difficult to have a philosophy that doesn’t assign moral relevance to pain qualia, that also explains why you shouldn’t kick the author in the balls right now. This is both snark and a serious answer.
Advaita Vedanta would postulate there is no reason to kick the author in the balls. One needs reasons to act, not to avoid acts.
There is no reason to seek out pleasure either.
https://realization.org/p/ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita.html
Random home improvement question. One of the doors on my hallway closet is bowed outward toward the top, probably about a half inch to an inch total. In any case it’s enough that it won’t stay in the holder at the top: it’s one of two facing doors that are each held closed by two metal things going into holders with rollers on them, on the top and bottom of the closet opening.
I’ve tried fixing this twice by un-bowing the door. To do this, I took the door off its hinges, put it on sawhorses, put maybe a few tens of pounds of weights on the ends (I used full paint cans) and left them there for a few days. The second time I left the weights on for longer, about 4-5 days. Each time it worked at first, but each time the door eventually bent back to its prior curve over the course of a month or so.
Is there something else I can do that would work better? Do I just need to use more weight and/or more time to get the recurving to “stick”? Would a different latch mechanism help hold it more strongly? Or is wood just recalcitrant like this and if I care that much about symmetry in my closet doors I need to replace the thing?
I would consider screwing something like this to the top of your door. If you have enough clearance above your door you won’t even have to recess it, unless you just want to make sure it’s well-hidden and looks super nice.
Probably you can find something that has holes pre-drilled into it.
I would bend it into the shape you want (with the paint cans or w/e) before attaching the brace.
Yeah. I figure secure it with a screw on the hinge side, then straighten the door by working outward one screw at a time.
Sorry, I’m confused– probably an artifact of my general lack of handiness. Can you say more about how that solves the problem? Is the idea to give it more thickness on the top, or to weight the top more so that it stays straight, or what?
The metal can’t bow that way, so if the door is attached firmly enough, it won’t be able to bend either. It is a brute force solution.
Ah, that makes sense now. And I see what you mean about bending it straight first, then attaching the brace to keep it from unstraightening. Thanks!
Add heat and steam: steam bending
Alright, Android people (the OS, synthetic humans need not apply).
I’ve been an Android user for a long time, but have never bothered with widgets (why bother with widgets when I can just open the apps, right?) After trying out a few widgets recently I’ve decided I should really explore what is out there, so my question is this: any recommendations for excellent Android apps/widgets? I’m not really interested in anything news related, but things like weather , device/system status/monitoring, and anything else neat you might think other people would enjoy.
For example, my Motorola X4 (I’m upgrading soon) provides a widget with a clock that also gives weather information, and the “rain in 13 minutes” based on my location is really handy, it would be nice to have that in widget form without it including a clock that takes up 25% of my screen since my phone already has a clock on it!
I’ve really only used the Beeminder widgets, recently. They’re good for at-a-glance of the status and time remaining, plus if you tap them it takes you right to data entry, if that’s the type of goal it is.
I used to use Google Now before that was retired.
What do you mean by “retired”? Isn’t (basically) all the functionality migrated to updates section of the Google Assistant? The upper left button on the screen where Google Now used to live.
I guess I don’t know what you’re referring to. I don’t see any Google Assistant widget.
I think my usage case is probably a bit different than yours, but I’ve found the “weawow” 1×4 weather widget to be the nicest one for displaying the week’s weather. The actual app also has pretty nice hourly visualizations for precipitation, etc.
I have another question for Android users. A recent (last year) update seems to have installed google assistant against my intentions. Now whenever I long press the home key (which I often accidentally do), Google Assistant tries to fire up. Is it possible to remove or shut down this ‘functionality’ which I do not want, without enabling Google Assistant and agreeing to its terms and conditions?
Use ADB ro remove google assistant. (and all the other bloatware)
You can turn google assistant off completely from settings. Searching for assistant (within settings) did the trick for me. Changing the settigns on the serach screen looked tempting, and appeared to work, but I had to select “set up google assistant” and turn off the top button there.
It looks like I cannot do this. I can’t find Google Assistant in Settings, or in Apps. I think it’s because it’s not actually installed until I long press the home key, and select ‘turn on’ I really want to avoid turning it on just so I can then turn it off. MOREOVER, I want my phone to respond to a home key press WITHOUT starting up the Google Assistant ‘turn on’ process, which is annoying and delays me getting to the features of my phone I actually want to use.
I intend to try Lambert’s suggestion when I get back to my personal laptop.
If you’re comfortable sharing, more specific directions can be provided if you give your phone model and OS version. I would assume either 8.0 (Oreo), 9.0 (Pie), or 10 but if you have a really old phone it could be 7.0 (Nougat) I suppose.
I have a really old phone. Samsung Galaxy S5 running 6.0.1 (Marshmallow)
Don’t poke fun.
Aha – so that’s why I’m randomly getting things I don’t want on my relatively new Pixel 3a.
Overloaded buttons, that judge how long you pressed them, and do something different depending on the decisions – all clearly “explained” by some icon that everyone in the HI community knows the meaning of, and therefore believe that the same is true for everyone else.
And to think that at one time the main selling point of GUIs was that they were easier to use, and, in particular, intuitive.
Actually, I rather figured that UI misfeature would be one of the many things Android and iOS have in common. I just didn’t know the specifics of which UI elements are overloaded in this way on Anroid, or where to look (and what they are called) so as to turn off whichever of the >1 potential responses I ‘m least likely to want, leaving (most often) a single function button.
I use KWGT and Monthly. KWGT is basically “design your own widget” — I have it set up with a bunch of shortcuts at the bottom of my screen, a music controller, and then the date, time, and weather at the top. What’s useful about it is that (a) you can tweak transparency etc to show off your wallpaper, if you care about that, and (b) you can show exactly the information you’re interested in — I like to know what week it is of the year, so the date section shows “Tuesday, 10 March, Week 11 of 2020”.
Monthly is just a widget showing your calendar (I use gcal), which shows a month view with event labeling on the home screen.
I also have the Google Keep widget on a second screen, because I find it helpful to have easy access to shopping lists etc when I’m one-handed at the store.
Check out Tasker!
Joao is amazing.
These smart phone things are amazing, and they ship severly handicapped. With tasker, root, Xposed, Magisk, et cetera, you can unlock the true power of these things.
-Have your bedside charger maintain 50% overnight keeping your battery fresh and not overcharging
-Have a widget to toggle whether or not to send your location to your wife if your phone gets to 3% battery
-Have your phone always be unlocked on certain networks. (Some smartphone manufacturers advertise this as some sort of perk for their brand. Now google is on board, but this has been natively supported since the beginning.)
-Have single/double/short/long squeeze on Pixel or ‘Chop’ on Moto to do literally anything like screenshot, picture, send location, backup, call your mother/911, etc.
The Wand in the Word, which interviews several fantasy authors. A theme that emerges is how a specific generation of authors were basically all Six Degrees of Tolkien.
The Sakugabooru Blog goes deep on industry context for anime.
Maybe Weird question: does anyone know whether the initial infection site makes much difference with coronaviruses?
As in, do people who are infected through the lungs get worse lung problems than those infected through the gastro tract or cuts?
I’m not sure you’d even get sick if you were only exposed to the virus through a cut; the virus might not be able to survive in the environment of the human bloodstream, at least not long enough to reach the respiratory organs. Part of the reason vaccines work is that, in addition to using a weakened form of the pathogen in question, intravenous exposure is typically a less effective or ineffective method of transmission for many bacteria and virii.
That said, I am not a medical expert and I could be totally off base with this particular example, so don’t go injecting yourself with coronavirus because of this post.
my gut intuition is that it must still be quite harmful however it’s introduced, otherwise the live virus itself would make a semi-decent vaccine.
But hoping someone with virology expertise can chime in.
my gut intuition
..is exactly what’s needed here.
I’m perfectly willing to accept contradiction, hence why I explained the reasoning.
If it was that easy we could just make up vials of the unaltered live virus and inject them into muscle or skin near some major lymph nodes in people at risk from the virus.
That we don’t do so hints that such an approach wouldn’t work.
I’m sorry, I was just making a “gut” joke, given the subject matter, not being sarcastic. But I can see how someone might take it that way.
Iirc most vaccines are subcutaneous (under the skin) rather than intravenous (into a blood vessel).
I’m pretty sure they’re mostly IM (injected into the muscle). But that doesn’t need to make you sick, just to expose the right cells (naive B and T cells) to the antigens in the vaccine
[Disclaimer: I’m an interested amateur–real experts are around who will hopefully correct me if I say something dumb.]
Basically, B cells are antibody factories. Naive B cells have a more-or-less random pattern which their antibodies will bind to. When they encounter an antigen they can bind to, and also get an activating signal from a T cell, then they get turned on–they start reproducing and cranking out antibodies. The activating signal from a T cell is necessary, because some of those naive B cells would make some antibody that bound to something important in your body and killed you–hopefully the T cell won’t let that happen.
Naive T cells also have a random pattern they match to–based on chunks of cut-up antigen that they will bind well to. They’re produced via a process that weeds out T-cells that either can’t bind to the right kind of cells, or that reacts to self antigens too strongly. Also, T cells don’t go find antigen on their own–they get it from other cells of the innate immune system called antigen-presenting cells (macrophages and dendritic cells, and maybe some others I don’t know about). The T cells get some antigen presented to them, bound to a molecule called MHC2 on the antigen presenting cell surface. The presenting cell also sends some signals to them at the same time, and only if the signals are right does the naive T cell get permission to mature[1].
When the T cell is allowed to mature, it starts making copies of itself, and also starts going around binding to B cells that want to start making antibody and turning them on. The immune memory that we get from vaccines and from getting exposed to something comes down to having a reasonable circulating population of these T and B cells that recognize a given pattern of antigen–the B cells keep some level of the antibody in the plasma/blood/gut/etc., and the T and B cells ramp up production quickly when they see more of the antigen.
The amazing thing, to me, is that this is all done blind. The T and B cells are produced via this process that scrambles up a certain part of their genes that will produce the binding end of the antibody and the T-cell receptor, and your body has no way of knowing what antigens it will face in the future–it just makes up a bunch of random patterns, filters out the ones that won’t bind to the right receptors or that bind too well to self antigen, and then waits–eventually an antigen shows up that has some fragments that happen to match to something on your B and T cells, and then this evolution-like process takes it from there and gives you immune memory.
[ETA] When you inject say inactivated flu virus and some extra chemicals to get a rise out of your immune system into a muscle, this summons the right kinds of cells to get this process rolling, and you soon have B and T cells that will bind to that antigen reproducing until you’re well-prepared to fight off the actual virus if you see it.
[1] This whole system is really very complex, more than I’m explaining and more than I’m capable of explaining. The signals the T cell gets from the APC also tells it which direction to develop in–it can be a kind of cell that turns on B cells, or one that activates the cellular response (macrophages, natural killer cells, and other goodies). It can also become a regulatory T cell whose job is to turn the immune response down so it doesn’t kill you off. And there are other T cells that just do the cellular immunity thing and kill infected/cancerous cells off by themselves. Also, mature B cells eventually switch from making the first kind of antibody (IgM) to other kinds (IgG, IgA, IgE). And later on, there’s this cool selective breeding/directed evolution thing your body can do where it evolves B cells whose antibodies will bind more tightly to the antigen. Immune systems/pathogens have been in a constant evolutionary arms race since immune systems evolved, so they’re really fiercely complex.
One of the trends in economic impacts of COVID-19 is that major events are getting cancelled, such as SXSW, which borks businesses who were counting on that revenue. I don’t think that the manufacturing sector can really make up for supply chain disruptions, but the chain of debt in the service/entertainment sector always seems to terminate with “business/owner needs to pay the rent.” Can the rent-seekers mitigate some partial economic downturn by simply forgiving a month’s worth of debt? An insistence on collecting rent from an otherwise-stable person hit by temporary external circumstances seems like quite a defecting position, to society’s detriment. How many ending points of the debt chain really need to reject temporary forgiveness (to recoup construction costs), or is it that systems have been built so that looking for such cases is just too much effort? Is this a problem resulting from poor culture (proliferation of low-margin practices), and/or is it something that could be addressed through law?
Landlords have bills too. I’m not sure it really is a “defection” in many cases, appreciated as grace would be.
And of course, once you make a policy of it, you have to require proof unless there’s so much space in the margins you can absorb the fraud as well.
A solution that circumvents this issue is to make it easier to get a small loan to pay rent for the next few months, and pay the interest to the bank (or the landlord if he wants to rent). As long as they actually pay it back and don’t go bankrupt, everybody wins. You wouldn’t be able to get another while you are paying off the first, and if you go bankrupt with such a loan you would likely never get another.
I don’t doubt that nefarious minds could squeeze this for everything its worth, but I at least can’t think of anything obviously terrible off the top of my head.
Using “rent-seekers” here strikes me as rather confusing. Is that intentional?
Yes, I’m using rent-seekers to more specifically talk of people who charge rent a little to no cost to themselves if no one takes them up on their offer.
Let’s assume you own a conference center or a hotel. You are going to have full-time employees dedicated to handling bookings, cleaning and servicing the property, running security, and so on. You have to pay those people whether or not anyone books your venue.
Even if you could fire some people, if you skimp on maintenance or security, you might end up with very expensive problems that require even more money to solve, like water damage or graffiti.
You’re also going to have to pay property taxes on the value of the property, even if you didn’t make any money. A lot of companies have a mortgage they need to pay as well.
COVID is going to be devastating for a lot of these companies. It’s a terrible time to be in the concert or conference venue business.
You would much rather be the comic book company that organized a conference and then had to cancel at the last minute, than the property management company. The comic book company can always sell comic books online. The property management company is looking at months or maybe even a year of trying to sell something that is going to be about as popular as smallpox blankets. They are screwed.
Yhey can even close down the hotel and have almost no labor costs for a month if they need to, along with much lower utility costs (it’s not freezing in most of the US, so you could turn everything off if you needed to), and no laundry/cleaning supplies/food/etc. costs. Maybe you need one person to go to the hotel every day and make sure things aren’t in an obvious state of crisis, but no more than that. But property tax, depreciation of assets, interest on debt, leases (if they lease their land or any equipment)–all that stuff costs money regardless of how much business they have or don’t have.
I would assume almost all of those people are hourly with no guarantee of payment if they aren’t put on the schedule.
Usually, the landlord isn’t the endpoint of the chain. He’s typically got a mortgage to pay. The bank or GSE that holds the mortgage probably has its own capital costs (depositors, bondholders, etc) as well.
Ultimately, postponing, forgiving, or capitalizing payments probably means somebody has to borrow money. Maybe the service/entertainment business, or their landlord, or their landlord’s bank. Ultimately, the borrowed money comes either from people selling off other assets or from the Federal Reserve changing policy to make more money available (by bidding down interest rates with freshly-printed money, or by changing reserve rules to induce banks to lend out more of their reserve cash). Both of these things are already happening: see the recent performance of the stock market for selling off other assets, and the Fed announced about a week ago that they’d be trying to bid down interest rates on the bond market by 50 basis points.
I’m not necessarily terminating the debt chain at landlords. As you say, they may be taking in payments to fulfill their own. But someone is at the end of the debt chain, unless it’s a circle because somehow the wealthy has picked up a significant consumption problem, but this is unlikely, as many have stated that the wealthy come by it via investment that dwarfs their consumption. So there are people out there who are mostly just taking it in, who have plenty of margin to put a hold to payments for a while.
Above, DarkTigger wrote about Italy doing this very thing, suspending mortgage payments.
The investments of the wealthy are not necessarily in this debt chain, but also in microsoft stock and apple stock etc. So maybe we are going outside of the debt chain to add money to it to keep it going.
Doesn’t that somewhat support my position, though, that continuing to demand rent in this situation will only do more harm to their investments? The stock won’t maintain its value if the consumers have no money to consume with, because it all went to rent. It’s the opposite of trickle-down economics.
For reasons that I can’t quite recall in a CW-free thread, I spend a chunk of last year ago working a full time job that had previously given me a pay check, but decided it didn’t want to for a few months.
At the time, our organization literally gave us all form letters to hand to our mortgage holder / landlord basically saying “Dear Sir, [insert person here] cannot pay the rent this month due to XXXXXXXX. Please consider working with them to postpone their payments.” I recall this working out not particularly well – some people got payments deferred but most banks that served this particular segment of society kind of did an end-run around the issue by offering people short-term, no-interest loans to help cover the slack.
Urgh, even with no interest, that’s the bank essentially getting a free extra month’s worth of cash, or adding 0.28% interest on the original loan (if my math is correct), per month of the short-term loan.
How are you coming up with that? I don’t see how the bank is getting anything extra here.
I give you $50. You pay me back $50 next week. I didn’t get any extra money out of this exchange.
Yeah, on further thought I see how it works.
Seems weird why they just can’t issue a hold, though, instead of this weird workaround. What are their spreadsheet formulas doing, that adding this extra transaction is the easier way?
In this particular case, the bank that was offering us the loan was not the same bank that held our mortgage / collected our rent. I realize this wasn’t clear in my initial post, my apologies.
For context – it was during the government shut down. USAA, Navy Fed and a couple other military/federal focused banks all offered no-interest loans as long as you signed up to guarantee your reimbursement paycheck would be auto-deposited to them. It let people keep collecting a “paycheck” despite not actually getting paid. I don’t think those banks considered this a particularly large risk, since everyone knew that the government had to open back up sooner or later.
This is equivocation of the worst kind.
This is probably fair. See my clarification to Ouroborobot above.
It seems to me that one of the best mitigation efforts we could have would be the Federal Reserve issuing a statement that they will fully reimburse hotels/convention centers/airlines/etc. for all the refunds they have to issue for cancellations. This would encourage these businesses to cancel in exchange for this full payment, which would increase the likelihood of actually canceling these events. It would also function as a one time shock to the money supply. This might cause some mild inflation down the line, because the increase in money supply would have been paired with a decrease in goods and services provided. But it would at least mean that the costs would be shared equally, rather than being borne entirely by some specific set of links in the chain (either the convention centers issuing refunds, or the professional organizations having to pay for non-refundable room bookings, or the individual travelers paying for non-refundable bookings, or the grant agencies reimbursing the travelers for the bookings they didn’t complete, or whoever).
+1
How much money (rough approximation/gut feeling is fine) are you expecting to be needed for this?
Many of these businesses should fail, because they failed to plan for disasters.
We have a moral hazard where if a large enough group of grasshoppers all fuck up together, they get bailed out, while the ants that were responsible and made sure they would never be a strain on the community by carefully planning to be ready for something like this just watch their efforts wasted.
But it’s too late for that. As much as it is a moral hazard and as much as I hate that, if I were in the White House right now I might be arranging this exact plan.
I’m not sure how many businesses can properly plan for “what if we have ~$0 revenue for 2-6 months while we still have to pay our bills”. Especially privately owned or small-medium sized local businesses.
Wal-Mart can go suck an egg, but I am worried about, for example, my favorite small local music venues.
Even more so for conventions.
If your business model is “we will host a massive gathering of people roughly once a year” you can’t hedge around some externality coming up that makes it unwise for massive groups of people to gather at that particular time.
Well, they kind of do, they generally have insurance for when something fails or they have to cancel, but at least in the cases I’ve seen insurance is not covering at least some, maybe most, of these cancellations for events/festivals due to the coronavirus.
I think those insurance plans would pay out to the host if they were forced to cancel due to, say severe hurricane damage or something.
@acymetric
I’ve been hearing that with flights and cruises—if you’re actually sick your cruise insurance would reimburse you, but if you just don’t want to get sick, you’re SOL. I’m wondering if this is a glaring-in-hindsight omission from regular insurance policies, or if it was left out deliberately for some reason, or what.
I mean, the insurance company’s goal isn’t actually to cover you for stuff. Their goal is to cover you as little as possible for as few cases as possible while still convincing you to pay for the insurance. So…
Insurance spreads risk around.
It doesn’t really work when the whole world gets affected at once.
@acymetric
Right, it will cover if the convention literally can’t happen (as per your hurricane situation) and probably won’t cover it if the convention is cancelled out of an abundance of caution… but I was talking about the potential future where people just don’t sign up for these conventions over the next 6-8 months until the risk spreads down.
@Aftagley
Ah, yes. At least in that case they can plan for the future accordingly (limiting expenses on the future event). They can’t unspend/uncommit money for the events that were supposed to be happening now. Agreed that both cases are problematic.
So you think business should predict that Christmas Will Be Cancelled This Year, every year until the one year Christmas does actually get cancelled? It’s not that companies are going low-margin because they choose to, but that they’ll get out-competed if they don’t give the shareholders rosy projections quarter after quarter. Rainy day funds are unpopular, and in some cases, not even tenable. Some of these businesses don’t have the margin to weather a disaster not because they could have planned for it and didn’t, but because they weren’t ever stable enough to implement any disaster contingencies in the first place. Businesses that actually have to worry about things like rent certainly aren’t likely to.
Also, some of these businesses are “Ted and Susan from down the street”, not multinational corporations.
I was reminded again of one of my favorite posts of Scott’s, Who by Very Slow Decay as I sat with my family in my 87 year old grandfather’s home on Sunday. Sudden cancer is killing him quickly. Just January he attended my nephews first birthday party.
Ironically there doesn’t seem to be too much pain in the process; cancer is weird like that. The treatment hurts more than the disease (in some stages of the the small number of cases I’m familiar with, at least). Reading Scott’s ruminations on ending one’s life through futile hospital interventions amidst forced smiles, incoherent screams, and of course plaques of bad but heartfelt poetry was comforting in at least knowing how it could be much worse.
It’s also kind of weird to observe how every memory I have of my grandfather is of him being old (to my recollection), though in a few years I’ll be the age he was when I was born.
My grandfather died after hitting his head and getting a brain hemorrhage. The doctors took off a piece of his skull to try to fix it, and for about a day we thought he was going to recover. But the bleeding didn’t stop, and there was nothing they could do. It took another two weeks for him to die, and he was pretty drugged up. The last time I saw him he was in the hospital, out of his mind on pain medication with a shaved, bloody head and tubes coming out of him all over. He kept tossing and turning and trying to pull out his tubes, and we would have to stop him each time. He looked to me like a man caught in a fever dream. I had always known him as quiet, dignified, and quick witted, and now he was a squirming skeleton in a hospital gown. He couldn’t understand us.
My cousin is a nurse, and she managed to get him discharged to home, where she administered his pain medications for the two weeks it took him to die. It was then I learned that death is usually awful and long, even in the best of circumstances.
My wife’s grandfather had kidney failure and a bad heart for years before his death. He hated dialysis, and often when I visited him he was in great pain. He had to have a leg amputated about a year or so before he died. It was a very, very long decline before he finally went to the ER for the last time. He would often say loudly that he was going to stop doing dialysis. “It’s not suicide,” he’d say with utmost seriousness. “If the Lord wants to heal my kidneys He will.” The unsaid second half of that sentence was that if He didn’t then it was time to go. But my wife, and the rest of his family who loved him, would always convince him to keep going and not give up. I still don’t know if our cajoling was the right thing to do.
I don’t really have a point except to say I’m terribly sorry for what you’re going through.
Hey, that’s fine, I didn’t really have much of a point either. It’s a relatively benign passing, all told, and if I get 87 years I don’t think I’ll feel cheated.
As I understand it, and contra some earlier, successful skin cancer surgery, the doctors never really gave a thought to trying some extreme measures to save him in this case because it was too advanced. Same thing happened to his wife a few years ago and almost to mine a few before that (but that’s another story).
What are your nominations for “best-sounding” album? Maybe “best-recorded” could be an alternative way to think of this.
One non-controversial/obvious candidate would be Aja by Steely Dan.
I really like the sound of Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden. And although I don’t really like the music or the band all that much, I have to admit Kid-A by Radiohead also sounds great.
Also, the Dave Douglas Quintet has an album called The Infinite that’s exceptionally good-sounding.
What are your picks?
Edit to underscore that I’m asking about best-sounding, not “your favorite” or “has the best songs” or whatever. Think about audio fidelity, recording quality, mix balance, that type of stuff.
“Carnet des Routes” by Aldo Romano, Louis Sclavis and Henri Texier. Not only great-sounding, but also one of the best jazz albums ever made.
“Ragged Kingdom” by June Tabor and the Oyster Band
“From the Green Hill” by Tomasz Stanko
I’m sure I will think of more as the afternoon progresses…
Another, I think obvious, one is the original recording of “Einstein on the Beach.” The voices sound like they’re right in the room next to you.
Dummy, by Portishead.
Other albums, taken as a whole, might be better, but Dummy has no bad songs. It’s a really complete exploration of a particular sound, done better than almost anyone else has.
Audiophile here. These ones are absolutely fantastic recordings and performances. Where important, I also listed the source as recording quality can differ between CD, LP or even pressing/remastering.
For rock/popular music, I recommend:
Janis Ian Breaking Silence (May be hard to find)
Dire Straits Brothers in Arms (original LP pressing)
Supertramp Crime of the Century (Mobile Fidelity LP)
Nils Lofgren Acoustic Live
Chris Jones RoadHouses and Automobiles
Amber Rubarth Sessions From the 17th ward
Rickie Lee Jones Rickie Lee Jones (original LP)
Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions
Gillian Welch The Harrow and the Harvest (LP)
World Music
La Segunda Sera Una Noche
Jazz
Jacintha Autumn Leaves
Oscar Peterson Trio We Get Requests (LP)
Eiji Kitamura Swing Sessions (Direct to disc LP, hard to find)
Duke Ellington Blues in Orbit (LP)
Bill Evans Live at Village Vanguard (and Waltz for Debby)
Ray Brown Trio Soular Energy (LP)
Classical
Heifetz/Reiner Tschaikowsky Violin Concerto (Living Stereo LP)
At a dance event I attended recently, the DJ played Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” slowed *way* down – 78 to 33. He says that slowing down recordings really shows up the imperfections, and that there just weren’t any in that recording.
A Jolene 45 played at 33 properly slaps.
Drops it a perfect fourth and a syntonic comma and sticks Dolly in the contralto range.
The YT comments seem to be interpreting it as a countertenor voice, which changes the nature of the song a bit.
I wonder how the power spectra of an alto and a countertenor differ. (and how Dolly dropped down a fourth fits)
I’d take the FFTs but I have other instruments I’m supposed to be analysing right now.
I have one in mind just because I recently listened to it and felt it had very clean production: Peter Gabriel’s first solo album. Also impressive because of the styles it spans; there’s an orchestra, a rock band, and a barbershop quartet/vaudeville arrangement, featuring Robert Fripp on banjo.
That’s a big question, but the nominee I’d go with off the top of my head is the album Tarot, by Aether Realm. Modern metal is full of over-compressed brickwalls and that’s a super dynamic record which really allows the layers to shine. Few things are harder to record well than that kind of symphonic/folk-styled metal that has layers and layers of keys, guitars, and vocals fighting over the same space in the mix, and that record pulls it off better than any other I could think of. That it was all pulled off on a low budget only makes it better.
Is your question “why should we care how anybody feels in a cold, uncaring cosmos”, or is it “why should we care about animal pain”? I think the first question is pretty much axiomatic to most kinds of consequentialism, after all, Jeremy Bentham already considered pain and pleasure central to his definition of utility. The view that avoiding pain is more important than achieving pleasure is generally called Negative Utilitarianism, and arguments for it can be found in the work of anti-natalists like David Benatar.
The moral relevance of feelings is also central to many popular or religious moral systems, embodied in the “Golden Rule”: “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”
When it comes to animals the question basically breaks down into three parts:
One, should we ever care about feelings we attribute to someone else, in addition to those we experience directly?
Two, assuming the answer to one is yes, are non-human animals included in the category of “beings whose feelings are morally relevant”?
Three, assuming the feelings of animals are relevant, why should their pain matter more than other things they may wish for?
The first question is the hardest to answer, so let’s just assume “yes” and move on. Question two has a lot of literature around it: Peter Singer and the Animal Rights / Animal Liberation movement in general. The basic argument is that human feelings are morally important, animals are similar (“on a biological continuum”) to humans, so animals’ feelings are important as well (“on a moral continuum”). Animal Rights philosopher Richard D. Ryder titled one of his books Painism, and summed up his argument in a Guardian article:
That said, many animal rights arguments care about things other than pain, and argue that animals should be able to achieve their positive desires. To move around unconstrained, to enjoy time with their offspring, to have access to sunlight and shade and fresh air…
Of course, many animals are not able to achieve these desires in nature, but many people don’t worry about that, because nature is not a moral agent.
yeesh, I decide I’m gonna defend EY and you just HAD to pick the post about catgirls. 😛 In any case, that quote was about hypothetically voluntarily altering our brains in some kind of post-singularity utopia to make ourselves desire the average member of the opposite gender more. That’s not his advice about how to think about morality. IIRC, his advice for moral reflection is along the lines of “think about what you prefer and value, why you have those preferences and values, and whether you endorse them on the meta-level; then keep the ones that are stable upon reflection.”
In the writing I’ve seen (“thou art godshatter” comes to mind), the evopsych is brought up to explain our instincts, not to explain them away. In any case, I’ll address your two examples. They’re actually very different cases!
One could go into various evopsych explanations of fidelity and infidelity, but that’s kind of besides the point. The real question is: Do you and your partner value monogamous fidelity to each other? Or would you both be happier in a polyamorous relationship? If the former is true: Your instinct is serving you well, continue being happily faithful to your partner! If the latter is true: Assuming you’ve thought this through, your instinct is probably a holdover from thinking of monogamy as the norm, and you no longer endorse it. “Unfaithful” doesn’t really seem like the right word if you’re both on the same page about polyamory; go on and be happily devoted (or not) to however many people you want! (again assuming they’re all good with the arrangement)
This isn’t just a moral question. This is an empirical question, followed by a moral one that depends on it. Presumably, one’s reasons for worshiping a higher power mainly stem from that higher power actually existing. If empirical evidence leads you to believe that there is no God, then that removes the moral impetus to worship Him. (Analogously, if evidence turned up that the Against Malaria Foundation had been spending their marginal donation money on booze and blackjack, you would conclude that it was no longer good to donate money to them. The specific judgement changed based on an update to your empirical beliefs, but your moral principles did not.) Of course, losing your faith could actually result in significant changes to your moral principles, but all that comes after you resolve the question of “Does a higher power exist?”
I think that once you arrive at “human feelings are not actually morally relevant from a cosmic perspective” you have left the area of consequentialism / utilitarianism entirely. The consequentialist either ignores this problem or essentially says “feelings may not be important to the cosmos, but they are important to me”. Discarding the importance of human preferences leads to some other moral system like nihilism or deontology.
I guess theoretically there could be a materialist position that does argue that feelings are actually cosmically important (maybe by privileging sentience?) but sadly, I’m not aware of such arguments.
I enjoy historical podcasts, and one has raised a question that I was hoping someone here might have more insight on. I have been listening to the second season of What We Saw (which can be found on Apple Podcasts among other places), which deals with the Cold War. The first season was about the Apollo program and was very good and so far the second has been of similar quality. It should be noted the the creator, Bill Whittle, is a staunch conservative and the podcast openly acknowledges that it looks at the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil (or “liberty and slavery”). As such it tends to linger on USSR atrocities. That’s fine by me: I would prefer more of my podcasts were explicit in their biases up front. So far I’ve learned a lot about USSR atrocities that I didn’t previously know, and whenever I’ve double checked a factual claim it has come out accurate.
However in the early episodes there is a claim that is much harder to verify. Bill Whittle claims that as World War II was winding down it was Stalin’s plan to use his massive military machine to take as much of Europe as possible, up to and including declaring war on West Germany, France, etc. The claim is that Stalin believed that the war weary British and American democracies did not have the stomach to outlast him in a fight for continental Europe, and that Stalin has a powerful numerical advantage on the continent in terms of men and machinery. The only reason that Stalin did not use his massive army to launch WW III right out the gate was the American development of nuclear weapons. This, Whittle claims, changed the calculus: America would not need to commit massive amounts of blood and iron to defend Europe now that they had nuclear weapons. Atom bombs could wipe out Stalin’s massive ground forces and turn Stalingrad into glass. Thus, the claim goes, the invention and use of nuclear weapons by the Americans not only prevented a costly land invasion of Japan but also prevented WW III by demonstrating to Stalin the power of atom bombs, which forced him to abandon a plan of outright war against the western powers in the aftermath of WW II.
This is a remarkable claim: for one thing it significantly changes the moral calculus on using the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the effects of nuclear weapon development in general. It’s also something I had never heard of before. Quick and casual Googling has not been helpful in determining how valid the claim is, so I thought I’d bring it to the thread. Do you think, if nuclear weapons had not been developed, Stalin would have outright invaded parts of Europe after WW II? Was that really in the cards? Was that an actual plan Stalin had in the works? Or is this just wild speculation by an open American patriot to help justify America’s use of nuclear weapons?
Edit: (If this is too close to culture war then forgive me, but I honestly just want a historical and tactical assessment which I think is fine. I’m not interested in moral assessments, just factual ones).
From all the histories I’ve read, one of the reasons America dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki was to convince the Soviets that we had an ample nuclear arsenal at our disposal. And yes, in the absence of nuclear weapons, I think Stalin would have advanced his troops as far west as possible, and beyond. “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
I’m about 65% sure I’ve read meeting minutes at the Truman library which say this was at least believed to be a real possibility by American leadership at the time, but Wikipedia says it’s not ‘accepted by mainstream historians,’ whatever that means, so I could be imagining things.
This theory is often repeated, but not supported by any actual evidence that I’ve seen. The principles involved were all overwhelmingly concerned with japan.
The US military didn’t know the atomic bomb would end the war at the time. That is hindsight. They would have dropped however many it took for Japan to surrender. They dropped the first two in August 1945 and had a third one “on the way” tentatively scheduled for late August/early September,…and were apparently planning for three atomic bombs a month (possibly with a concurrent invasion!)
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/25/weekly-document-the-third-shot-and-beyond-1945/
That’s a remarkable transcript. It really illustrates how they didn’t really know what they had at the time. They’re discussing how soon troops could land after bombing a beach, and they are mostly worried about unexploded ordinance, as if it was a normal bombing run. No discussion of the radiation danger. It remind me of Bean’s post on the Navy’s nuclear detonation tests after the war, and how they really underestimated how much radiation would be left behind and for how long.
“Behold! I am become Death, destroyer of your troops by cancer.”
It’s also interesting because a defense commonly made of dropping the atomic bombs is it they were necessary to end the war with fewer casualties. If it surprised everyone that it ended the war so quickly, well, that’s very nice, but that should change how we view the decision to use them.
@Nick
To be fair, it sounds like the tactical use of nukes was just speculation in this transcript. And even if planners had planned for Japan’s surrender, they had no way of knowing how many bombs it would take. It’s only prudent to prepare for many bombings, and prepare for the possibility of having to invade anyway, even if they had hoped and expected not to need to.
Honestly the morality of the bombings is a personal quagmire for me that I can’t settle to my satisfaction. One thing listening to this podcast has made me wonder at though is how amazingly fortuitous it was that America was the nation to first acquire nuclear weapons. If it had been the Nazi’s, well, no need to speculate on what a disaster that would have been. But if it has been Stalin then maybe he would have leveraged them to take more of Europe. That the A-Bomb landed in the lap of America, a country with no real desire to conquer anybody at that point in history is just…I don’t know how to describe it other than Providence. If Stalin had the bomb first I can imagine him using it to conquer and subdue. Because we got it first even those who got it afterwards were too afraid to use it. And then because the USSR got it soon after we did, America was also put in check: if we were the only ones with nukes I imagine we might have been sorely tempted to use them in Vietnam, and we just missed using them in Korea.
Maybe I’m putting too much weight on this, but the more I learn about the Cold War the more I feel like it was a marvelous miracle that things have turned out as well as they have.
I don’t see how Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be morally different than say…firebombing Dresden or Tokyo. All are indiscriminate devastation. That one bomb does the work of hundreds doesn’t change anything. The ‘fuel” used doesn’t change anything.
Every now and again, I see evidence that some otherwise-respectable seeming allied leader immediately post-WWII was basically willing to stay on wartime following after the war ended, re-mobilize Germany and march east from Berlin until Uncle Joe was no more. Churchill is the most common example of this, but I’ve heard that there’s a pretty long list of people who, at the time, were convinced that war with Russia was imminent following the defeat of the Germans.
In response to this information, you can either just assume that all these people were so blinded by a hatred of communism that rationality departed them, or accept that the idea of war with Russia immediately following WWII wasn’t an impossibility.
As for your claim, I doubt there was any one thing that prevented Stalin from invading Europe. Nukes were almost certainly a factor, but I don’t know if focusing on them to the exclusion of all else is correct.
Mind recommending some? I listen to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, but that’s about it. If you’ve got any others you like, I’d love to hear them.
How could this be culture war? I mean, it was a culture war, but we’re talking about stuff that was almost 80 years ago since it happened and 30 years since the country involved collapsed.
Tides of History is quite good. The host is extremely knowledgeable, and he does a good job of making it feel relevant and real. The podcast originally started under the name “Fall of Rome” and dealt with all that, and has since been slowly making its way to modernity. It is extremely detailed, but the host’s monotone voice can be a bit boring sometimes.
99% Invisible is supposed to be about design, but is mostly about the history of designed objects when you get down to it. It has a lot of great episodes dealing with various historical subjects. I like to pick and choose from it’s extensive episode list for interesting topics.
Gastropod is all about food, but as a result there are a lot of neat episodes about history, like the history of cheese, or the tea trade, etc. It’s another pick and choose kind of podcast.
Sawbones is specifically about the history of medicine. It’s not as good as the other ones listed, but not bad.
I’m sure there are a ton of others out there, but those are the ones I listen to. What We Saw season 1, about the Apollo program, was really good and I recommend it.
I dunno, that’s what I thought to. But then again, you never know. I’m probably being too cautious with that notice, but I’ve seen other people go wrong on the threads before so better safe than sorry.
EDIT: In my podcast list I forgot to mention American History Tellers which (despite having a terrible name) is quite good. It has some very interesting stories about pieces of American history.
I am currently in the middle of History of Byzantium, which is very good, and once I finish it, I plan to try History of the Papacy.
I already finished Fall of Rome, also very much recommended.
Regarding Stalin and possible WWIII, it is obvious that even without nuclear weapons Anglo-American alliance in 1945 was vastly stronger than USSR. Perhaps Stalin was too irrational to be deterred from war by that fact, but also sufficiently rational to be deterred by nuclear weapons, but personally I find that implausible.
thanks for those recommendations.
Also while it’s true that in 1945, the anglo american alliance is much stronger than stalin, by 1947, it definitely wasn’t, if not sooner. In a long fight, sure, but the soviets de-mobilized far less than the west did after the war, and had substantial conventional superiority.
@Evan Þ
thanks for that, that was a typo. I think you might be right about 1946, but it was definitely true by 47.
The West was most likely stronger on 10 May 1945 (depending on how you weigh logistics train v. boots on the ground), but the United States demobilized fast enough that I doubt they were still stronger by 1946.
And A History of the World in 100 Objects.
The History of Rome
Revolutions
Both by Mike Duncan. If you listen quickly, you may be able to catch up before Duncan completes the Russian Revolution!
The Ancient World
Several series exist by this fellow, but IMO the first one is the best (back on page 16 of that rather bad layout). Lots and lots of episodes, great detail, and while I thought his voice was kind of boring at first it ended up being quite pleasant.
The big names have been mentioned, but here are some quirky ones.
Cautionary Tales: More focused on how things go wrong, but uses a lot of niche historical examples such as the great British airship race.
Inward Empire: A podcast that focuses in on American national history on subjects such as the Great Strikes and the Pinkertons. Very few episodes but the ones that are there are top quality.
Spectacular Failures: Dead itself (ironically) but has some great stories of how major corporations fell.
Wittenberg to Westphalia: Come for the wars of the Reformation. Stay for the remarkably detailed information on life in medieval Europe. Also, wait for the wars of the Reformation because its been 6 years and he’s still laying groundwork.
A History of Oil: Dead as well but covered the entire sweep of the discovery and explosive growth of the global oil industry during its run.
I’ve certainly heard “part of the reason for actually using the a-bomb was to scare the Russians” many times before. But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard “and were it not for that, the red army would have advanced all the way to the English Channel” before…
The timeline’s all wrong if the idea is that using that atomic bomb prevented the invasion. If Stalin was planning on attacking Western Europe he wouldn’t have shifted forces East to attack Japan. It’s possible that the knowledge of the atomic bomb before it was used prevented him from continuing into Western Europe.
Is it likely that Stalin may have been planning to take the rest of Europe, but only after the war was over and America and Britain had moved off of a war footing? Or would it have been better to just keep marching West immediately after the fall of Berlin?
Right, but the *second” bomb demonstrated that we had more than one. How many more, Stalin might not have known.
Even the Americans didn’t really know.
In planning for Operation Downfall, numbers like 7 and 15 were thrown around.
The Red Army’s logistical tail was rooted firmly in Detroit; they managed their impressive production numbers for tanks and planes by largely outsourcing their manufacture of trucks and locomotives to the United States. So I’m skeptical of any claim that they were likely to try invading places that already had American troops all over them.
Grabbing as much of Europe as they could without having to fight the Americans and their close allies, then settle in for the defense, sure. They can defend in place without America’s help. But the amount of advancing they can do without positive US assistance, would not extend to overrunning all of Europe to the Pyrenees, and I doubt would gain them enough counter losing every bit of common-allies-against-the-Nazis goodwill.
Also, and notwithstanding the cheese-eating surrender monkeys bit, if you try to tell Paris even in 1945 that you’re going to conquer their entire country and you expect them to not put up a fight because they’re tired of fighting, they’re going to put up a fight. If you tell London and Washington that you’re going to conquer the France they just spent four years liberating and you expect them not to put up a fight because they’re tired of fighting, they’re going to look into all the low-impact ways of fighting they can engage in, like dropping bombs on your armies and supply lines from 30,000 feet and shipping the backs-against-the-wall French all the lend-lease goodies that they’re no longer shipping to Russia. Even without atomic bombs, that doesn’t end well for Stalin.
Stalin and his generals almost certainly understood all of this, so I’m going to ask what hard evidence Whittle has for this hypothesis.
Just to be super clear, I’m not entirely sure if Whittle thinks that Stalin would have invaded France. He was kinda vague about the extent of what Stalin’s plan was, which is one of the reasons I tried to get more historical info. However I do remember that Whittle specifically stated that Stalin would have taken West Germany by force if necessary if the atom bomb hadn’t been in the equation. Do you think taking West Germany (possibly by just by throwing his weight around diplomatically) might have been feasible?
Good point about the logistical end of things. I was wowed thinking about massive tank battalions charging west, and forgot about the fact that we were propping up their war effort to such an extent.
Was there a particular reason they wanted West Germany? Revenge, native ethnic Russian populations, residual industry or resources, geography, show of strength?
Whittle didn’t say. Then again, I’m not sure he needed to. Why did they want Poland? Why did they want East Germany? Why did they want Romania? The USSR seemed hungry for client states and buffer zones at the time.
If Stalin wanted more of Germany than he historically got, the obvious first move is to have his army march to the point of first contact with the armies of the Western allies and say to the allide commanders on the ground, “our orders from Moscow are to march another twenty miles west, today, and we will obey our orders and if you try to stop us then you will be responsible for starting a war with Soviet Russia”. And maybe this is a bluff. But it maybe gets them a chunk of West Germany for free, and it definitely gives them a good indication of whether they’ll be able to take all of West Germany on the cheap while retaining the opportunity to back down if it’s going to be too expensive.
And, they didn’t do that. Even when Stalin didn’t know that the US had atom bombs, they didn’t do that.
I’m pretty sure both sides deliberately considered forestalling the whole Cold War thing with a prompt march to the Atlantic/Moscow, and decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
Yeah, in both cases, the potential enemy had a big mobilized army right there, ready to go, so it wasn’t going to be “attack an unprepared enemy and destroy his air force on the ground,” it was going to be “attack an enemy with a large veteran army mobilized and ready to go right now and maybe get in one surprise attack on your allies before they figure out what’s going on.” Also, I think it would have been politically very hard for the Allies to have turned on the USSR at the end of the war, and I think the USSR was still getting substantial aid from the US up until the very end of the war.
Well, the Red Army didn’t have to tell the US and UK forces “we’re going to march opposed against you” to get them to pull back, as we did that without the threat: the Line of Contact was significantly inside the area we had already agreed to give the USSR at Yalta, and it would have been a tough sell politically for Truman to not keep faith with them after the end of the war. The West made the calculation that it was better to pull back to the agreed-upon lines to get access to Berlin, so putting up an actual fight to keep more than we had agreed to give them wasn’t in the cards.
Aside from that, I’ve always heard there was a real possibility that the Western Allies could have captured Berlin before the arrival of the Soviets, being only about three days’ march from the German capital by early to mid April before the start of Seelow Heights. Eisenhower actively decided not to pursue it because it wasn’t seen as worthwhile to sustain massive numbers of US and UK casualties for a city that we’d already decided to give to the Soviets.
This, this. Soviet mass production of things like “tanks 98% as good as those fiddly expensive Panthers” was amazing, but the Red Army being the amazing machine it was was utterly dependent on being able to outsource manufacturing of what really won the land war: trucks. When asked how the Allies won the war, Eisenhower always said (IIRC) “Jeeps, 2 1/2 ton trucks, and liberty ships.”
it’s worth noting that, like all soviet economic figures, soviet ww2 production figures cannot be taken at face value due to the pervasive lying up and down the system. the soviets definitely made a lot of T-34s, IL-2s, etc. but almost certainly not as many as they claimed to.
Sure, but the point is that for any value of X T-34s and IL-2s, there would have been 1/5 as many or less if we hadn’t shipped the USSR every truck for their Motor Rifle Divisions and sundry logistics on liberty ships.
Oh, definitely. And that’s to say nothing of the radios, aluminum, aviation gas, rolling stock, and other goods, lots of which had a value to the USSR in excess of their dollar cost because the soviets couldn’t get them any other way.
Didn’t Russia walk away from WWII in control of most of eastern Europe?
Why would it make sense for Russia to be afraid enough of getting nuked to not want to march into Austria, but not enough to leave Poland?
Well the idea is that we would have had to ask them to leave Poland. Which means risking that they would say no (which, I think, they probably would). And we didn’t really have a strong enough interest in liberating Poland to go to war and nuke several million Russians.
By the same token, if Stalin wanted West Germany bad enough to fight over it, would we have been willing to go to war for them? I could see an argument to be made that we wouldn’t have.
Which is ironic since the reason that the UK entered the war is so that Poland wouldn’t be under the yoke of a totalitarian tyrant.
Poor Poland. I get so angry when I read about the early stage of the war, and how Britain and France sat on their defensive lines while Germany ran roughshod over Poland. If they had gotten off their buts and forced Germany to fight actively on two fronts we might have nipped things in the bud. Then again I can’t blame them for thinking things would play out like WWI and wanting to stick to Maginot line.
The Poles fought magnificently against impossible odds, and their reward was 50 years in chains. Doesn’t seem fair. I hope their future is brighter than their past.
@FLWAB
Yeah, Poland was the opposite of blameless. They invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then after allying with the Germans in that act, deliberately provoked the Germans because they believed their guarantee from the British was sufficient to deter Hitler. They also refused Soviet aid, although that was probably wise as we know Stalin’s proposal didn’t guarantee Poland’s eastern border.
They basically played Russian Roulette with five bullets and were surprised when they shot themselves in the head.
If you ally with Hitler to gain land, you don’t get to act surprised when Hitler wants land.
The French invaded Germany in the first week of the war, while the British were bombing and blockading. There’s not much more that can be done before both armies are mobilized and the BEF had been deployed to France. Germany’s unexpectedly quick victory over Poland, aided by Stalin’s own invasion, allowed the Germans to pivot and deploy their whole force against France before that could happen.
To force the enemy to fight on two fronts is strategically wise if you can pull it off, but it requires armies on both fronts ready to go at the same time. If the enemy has strategic surprise and can win a decisive victory on one front before you can mobilize on the other, then you’re SOL for that plan.
When it doesn’t work your enemies get to call it “divide and conquer” in retrospect.
@John Schilling
It was my understanding that the French could have taken out Germany’s industrial base and won the war in the first few weeks if they hadn’t called off the invasion and abandoned Poland.
Saar Offensive
Can we really expect the Rhine-Ruhr captured before Fall Weiß was completed?
The French never crossed the Siegfried Line.
And if the German army hadn’t had something to say about it.
I’m familiar with the Saar offensive; that’s why I referred to it in my previous post. The idea that the Saar offensive leads to the destruction of Germany in three weeks if the French aren’t a bunch of pansies, just no. The Germans didn’t deploy their entire army to Poland; they had more than twenty divisions in the West, a strong fortified defensive line, and behind that a dense urban area with a loyal population. The French did not have their army mobilized in advance, and they did not have an army trained in the sort of rapid, flexible offensive tactics necessary to achieve decisive results in weeks.
There is no plausible offensive that doesn’t result in the French army advancing some modest distance into Germany and then being crushed by the victorious German army just returning from Poland. They need their own strong defensive lines to hold. And even if we imagine the French are going to go full scorched-earth on whatever bits of Germany they do temporarily occupy, that doesn’t save Poland. After 17 September, Poland cannot be saved, it can only be differently partitioned between its conquerors.
That’s not worth sacrificing the French army for. Temporarily occupying part of the Ruhr, if we very optimistically assume this was plausible, isn’t worth sacrificing the French army for. Sacking and burning the Ruhr, if we even more optimistically assume this was plausible, isn’t worth sacrificing the French army and the Western Allies’ moral high ground for. All of these leave Poland conquered, and put German troops in Paris sooner rather than later.
Again from Wikipedia, the Germans seemed to disagree:
That is one German, not “the Germans”, and it is a German war criminal standing trial for his crimes and so highly motivated to testify that everything possible was Somebody Else’s Fault. There is thus reason to suspect that his statement might be a weensy bit removed from the historical truth.
The Soviets were the first to enter Austria and immidiately began to form a provisional government (ambiguously puppety). A soviet occupation zone was agreed upon at Berlin. They just didn’t care that much and managed to get a bit of political goodwill by letting it re-unify in ’55 or so (after plundering what they could).
They could have absolutely gone all DDR.
To a first approximation, it’s probably wise to model political leaders as being focused, above all else, on retaining power. Foreign policy is largely for the consumption of domestic audiences or the enrichment of the regime, unless you have true megalomania at play (e.g. Hitler) or an existential threat to the nation is perceived to exist.
From what we saw of Stalin’s behavior, he didn’t seem to have the Hitlerian inclination to risk everything on dreams of conquest. Sure, he was happy to expand his territory and bully minor nations at relatively low cost when the opportunity was available. But he never did anything, wrote anything, or said anything to make us think he was willing to risk his regime starting another world war. Let’s remember that he was directly involved in the overthrow of a regime (or two) that fell from power largely due to misfortunes and mismanagement in WW1.
But all that said, people are complicated and miscalculations happen. When decisions of national destiny come down to the whims of one man, anything is possible.
Good thoughts. My only objection would be the implication of Stalin’s sincere belief in Marxist philosophy, particularly by the time 1945 rolled around. Not impossible, but not something that should be assumed. Either way, wielding Marxist philosophy was objectively valuable in giving moral authority to the USSR’s espionage and subversion efforts, however cynical Stalin’s core beliefs.
I always thought that because of Stalin’s deep belief in Marxism, he saw Communism’s victory as inevitable. So his foreign policy was essentially to take control of whatever he easily could, but not to make any desperate gambles. He didn’t see any need to do that, since history was on his side anyway. Its easy to forget now, but he had plenty of spies and sympathizers in the West who felt the same way, including some at the very highest levels of Western intelligence agencies and the press.
I think Marx also said something about capitalism inherently leading to war, and Stalin believed that too. So he probably figured he could wait for the next big war where the capitalist states would fight each other again, and communism’s reach could grow again (because communists would never fight each other, natch).
In summary, if I had to guess, I would guess that Stalin probably thought that more states would follow the path of Czechoslovokia in the future, rather than that of East Germany.
This reminds me of a historical interesting fact that I’ve wondered on, which is why fascists were such complete disasters at espionage while communist countries were really good at it.
Is it endemic in the systems or is it just coincidence?
I think the confounding factor is that there aren’t too many fascist countries to compare to. The Nazi’s were good and finding and taking care of enemy spies, but comically bad at spying on anyone else. But can this be blamed on fascism? It seems like the main problem is that the Abwehr leadership was not very committed to the whole Nazi project. The Abwehr was pretty realistic about Germany’s chances and as such were pessimistic of a good outcome to the war. It’s no wonder that Hitler disbanded it entirely in 1944. It seems like it was badly hampered by having to compete with the SS, RSHA, and SD. Hitler certainly liked pitting departments against each other, but I don’t know if that in particular to fascism or just Hitler.
I don’t know anything about Italian spy efforts but Italy was bad at everything at the time so that’s to be expected.
It probably helps that communism was popular among the Western intelligentsia in a way that fascism was not. Makes it easier to recruit informers.
Fascism is a generally nationalistic ideology, whereas communism is globalist. Spies, or at least spymasters, really ought to have a cosmopolitan education and speak multiple languages, and they also ought to have an ideological commitment to whomever they are spying for. So, one of these ideologies is more appealing than the other to the sort of person who goes to university and majors in international relations or whatnot. That’s the side that gets top spymasters on their own side and the best odds at recruiting the other side’s spymasters.
Also, the track record of Fascists on this matter is dominated by Nazi Germany, and Germany’s top spymaster was working for London for most of the war. Kind of puts a limit on their level of achievement in the espionage area. Does anyone have a good feel for how the Italians and Spanish did, espionage-wise?
I think it generally has to do with the ease of identifying spys. Germany had millions of ex pats living in the states during WW2, of course most people would know that they were ex pats and there would already be suspicion around them to some degree. Meanwhile since anyone could be a communist or convert later it is easier to disguise them.
Were the fascists really that great at anything of substance?
(They were tremendous at both appearances and audacity which, along with Hitler’s luck, brought them a lot of early sucesses.)
I feel like even answering this in the affirmative guarantees culture war, but Franco did alright at economic growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_miracle
@Atlas
Spain outgrew France and West Germany despite not getting Marshall Plan aid.
@EchoChaos
Spain was really, really poor when the civil war ended. Also, the multiple civil wars Spain went through during the nineteenth century didn’t help in getting a solid base. But Spain started from a pretty good place:
A big Mediterranean coast: advantages to trade, for tourism.
An Atlantic coast: trade, fishing. The only other country that has both an Atlantic and Mediterranean coas is France (the UK doesn’t count)
Close to developed, peaceful countries that are growing economically.
Control of the Gibraltar strait, on both sides of the strait.
A pretty solid industrial base.
An urbanizing population.
A young population.
More or less secure property rights.
A decent financial system: most of the big Spanish conglomerates are banks (Santander, BBVA).
Culturally uniform, Catholic.
Quite good farming land.
A country with all those advantages being poor is quite unnatural. I find it strange how stuck Portugal is, although they have fewer advantages.
@Atlas
That seems like backfitting. After all, Poland had all those advantages and didn’t grow that fast, and as @ana53294 points out, Portugal had all those advantages and actually fell behind Spain despite Portugal getting Marshall Plan aid and Spain not getting it.
I feel like if someone outgrows the expectation then they are expected to catch up, while if they don’t (e.g. the UK started from behind the USA and didn’t outgrow us), it’s because obviously they had some other disadvantage. Hindsight is 20/20, after all.
We can at least say that fascist economics were as good as free economics, which is quite good and much, much better than socialist.
>We can at least say that fascist economics were as good as free economics
In the case of postwar Spain, at least.
In other countries at other times… Let’s just say that I asked this question because i’d been reading Wages of Destruction.
@Lambert
Germany’s economic growth in the 30s and 40s is controversial enough that I wanted to steer clear of it for exactly that reason.
Taiwan would be the other fascist country that I would use as an economic example as until the late 30s the Kuomintang was officially fascist with the Blue Shirts Society.
Portugal was also fascist, and that didn’t work for them.
Fascist governments do seem to be less likely than socialists to screw up, but I don’t think they are better at taking positive actions. But then, no government seems to be very good at taking positive action to improve the economy, socialist or not.
The main reason for the Spanish Miracle was just stopping the autarchy nonsense and letting the economy run, though.
@ana53294
That’s not true. Portugal also grew pretty incredibly under the Estado Novo.
They were taken over by socialists in the Carnation Revolution in 1974 which killed their growth and created economic turmoil that put them behind the rest of Europe.
OK, I promised myself to stop engaging in debates on the Internet, but this particular thing always makes me feel angry, so here I am, delurking.
1) “Spanish miracle” wasn’t caused by any “economic fascism”, on the contrary, it happened because Opus Dei technocrats liberalised the economy.
2) Francoist Spain wasn’t fascist. Just as Republicans during Civil War weren’t all Stalinists, the Nationalist side was quite a loose coalition of various branches of conservatives, more rightist Christian Democrats, fascists (calling themselves National Syndicalists), and what here on SlateStarCodex would probably be called “paleoreactionaries” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditionalism_(Spain)]. Yes, technically other parties were merged to the fascist Falange, but as a consequence it itself bacame a coalition, rather than a strict monoparty. And actual National Syndicalists had strong position in it only until the end of WWII, for obvious reasons. Also Franco himself was a pragmatic dictator, rather not believing in any -isms except catholicism and anticommunism.
@ana53294
Portugal also wasn’t fascist. Estado Novo was an authoritarian national conservative regime, that supressed actual fascists, also, as in Spain, calling themselves National Syndicalists.
But is that real growth or growth reported by Soviets? People’s Republic of Poland lied a lot about these things. You know, we were the 10th economy of the world xD.
But overally it seems right. There is a reason why such a big share of elderly in postcommunist countries miss communism.
@Filareta
We may be drifting a little culture war, but isn’t the essence of fascism liberal economics with harsh right-wing social and national policies?
The parties that actually called themselves “fascist” all (almost all?) stopped after World War II for obvious public relations reasons. But the Kuomingtang, to take a specific fascist party, didn’t actually change their policies.
In fact, that was a major point of socialist rhetoric during the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was called the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”. The Soviets emphasized a LOT that fascist parties had changed their official ideology but not their policy and had been admitted by the Americans wholesale.
Now obviously fascism leads to a lot of bad and stupid things for nationalism (Portugal’s colonial wars were a complete mess), but the question “Were the fascists really that great at anything of substance?” is answerable with “their economics were comparable to, and in some cases better than, free countries”, which is indeed pretty great.
>isn’t the essence of fascism liberal economics
No.
Tight currency controls, MEFO, Italian corporatism, the Volks{kuhlschrank, empfænger, wagen}, the expropriation of Junkers etc.
@Lambert
I meant relatively liberal economics, not fully liberal. My understanding is that fascism as a third way ideology was an attempt to get the state control of the personal and national life without sacrificing the economic power of the corporations, etc.
Italian corporatism is exactly that, and it’s why many commentators point out that modern “Chinese Communism” is pretty much fascism.
I think discussion of history and academic political typology isn’t much CW.
I am confused. Do you mean “liberal economics” in American understanding of the term, or its true meaning (aka laissez-faire)?
[Edit: you clarified when I was writing]
Fascism in economy always adopts top-down, statist, interventionist mixed-economy. It’s not an accident that fascists in various countries called themselves National Socialists, National Syndicalists or, in case of my country, National Radicals (as in “economic radicalism”, not radical as a synonyme of extreme). They really meant it, wanting to create some third system, that wasn’t capitalism nor socialism, or in some cases even aiming for a full scale socialism (Strasser brothers, for example).
The element about “harsh right-wing social and national policies?” is also not true. Nazis for example aimed at loosening of social mores, because they thoutght that things like easy divorce or lower age of sexual initiation will be great for increasing German birth rates.
Italian fascists have never done that, with ecxeption of the part that deradicalised in 90s and became normal nationalists, so obviously stopped being fascists. Fascists in other countries even before WWII rarely used that label (with obvious exception of Brits), word “fascism” generally denoted ideology of Italian Fascist Party. Of course they were comparing themselves to Mussolini, of course there were similaraties and cooperation, but they didn’t view themselves as a single movement, and it is because of left-wingers, especially marxists-leninists, that we view fascism as a single phenomenon. Which is unfortunate, because those types have a tendency to use “fascism” as a slur.
Shamefully I know very little about Kuomintang, so I can’t relate.
But Soviets and many other socialists used “fascism” as a slur. They call everyone using force to stop an attempt to create socialist society a fascist. In the right mood, because often they call that everyone except them. That’s insane. Also calling every authoritarian and nationalist regime or polical movement “fascism” (which you seem to do) is wrong. Salazar, Franco, Metaxas, Horthy, Deutschnationale Volkspartei etc weren’t fascist. Some of them allied with fascists, also in 30s many non-fascist right-authoritarian forces adopted elements of fascist style (without adopting ideology) because it just seemed to be efficient in gaining followers, but essentially they were separate movements with different goals.
Not true at all. Fascist economy is a mess.
@Filareta
I politely disagree. The policy of Mussolini was specifically economic liberalism while remaining under state control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Charter_of_1927
The Labour Charter of 1927 says that private enterprise is the most efficient and the state should only interfere where it was deficient.
It’s certainly no UK or USA, but it’s not far from what e.g. FDR did in the USA (I think a commentator here said that FDR took the greatest hits of fascism and socialism in the New Deal)
Italy’s wasn’t until the Great Depression (after which it went on war footing and everything went to hell), and none of the fascist or fascist adjacent right-wing movements had substantially worse economies than prior or subsequent governments, unlike socialism.
I’m really skeptical of calling the Kuomingtang a fascist party. They certainly didn’t see themselves as fascist or call themselves such.
Sure, Chiang was a strongman and his movement was based around an identity of Chinese nationalism, but he was also trying to unite a country ruled mostly by warlords or foreign powers… you need to unite around something.
@EchoChaos,
“Bold persistent experimentation”, or “Throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks”!
I think it’s fair to say the U.S.A. came closest to being run on fascist lines while actively fighting Fascism (“War makes fascists of us all”).
A month or three ago (in response to a question) I started to put together an effort post on some British Fabian adjacent ideas and how they were later echoed in Mussolini’s Italy, Tito’s Yugoslavia, Ernst Wigforss’ Sweden, and Roosevelt’s U.S.A., but I gave up because I couldn’t see not coming across as radical anarchist, fascist, or socialist (depending on the readers point of view), and I didn’t want to risk it (for the record, though it’s fun to plan utopias, I think through providence/sheer luck the U.S.A. during the Truman years landed on a model that worked well that Eisenhower wisely kept, and any deviation from that model should be done very carefully and slowly, and when in doubt return to that model).
@Plumber
A similar effort has already been achieved.
@Aftagley
The Blue Shirts literally modeled themselves after the Brown Shirts, so I think it’s fair.
But one of the problems with talking fascism is that it is less of a defined ideology than is socialism and we still have internet debates about what “real socialism” is.
You see that in this thread with “was Franco actually fascist, was Salazar actually fascist”. I agree with @Plumber that FDR did some “fascist things”, but calling FDR a fascist, as is popular on the right occasionally, would be nonsense.
And yes, the Soviets and other commies did use fascist as a general purpose term of opprobrium even when it wasn’t relevant, but there were a lot of times it was relevant, which made their rhetoric have at least some force behind it.
@FLWAB
The allies definitely seemed worried that Stalin wasn’t going to obey the agreed upon separation. During Operation Eclipse, they raced forward to block the Soviets from advancing into Denmark. It seems unlikely to me that Stalin would have tried to conquer Europe, but he might have refused to give up a substantial amount of territory that he was not supposed to control, if he had the chance. That in turn might have escalated to war.
I’ve also seen it claimed that the (or one) reason for firebombing Dresden was to demonstrate to the Soviets the range and capability for destruction of Allied air forces. No idea if there is any evidence in support of this, and Wikipedia doesn’t seem to mention it.
Does Mueller cover Russia putting nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba (the “Cuban Missile Crisis”) in 1962? I’m not sure it has ever been determined whether those missiles had nuclear warheads, but they were nuclear capable.
Does Mueller cover the offer/suggestion/request from the USSR to the USA to join together to destroy Chinese nuclear facilities? This happened in 1969, and US was not interested.
It is a fact that no country with nuclear weapons has been involved in a major war with another such country (India-Pakistan may be a partial counterexample). I assume the “war of aggression” mentioned the linked article is the US invasion of Iraq, a country which quite notably had no nuclear weapons, but was suspected of either having them or developing them.
I’ve been reading Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. It’s an interesting book, and the basic argument may well be correct. But it strikes me that there is a serious problem with his view that a large part of the psychological difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives are afraid of change, while liberals welcome it.
The problem is that this is inconsistent with the politics of population and climate change. Both issues were about fear of change, in one case purported effects of population growth, in the other of warming due to greenhouse gases. In both cases, it was the left that was afraid of change.
Of course, someone on the left might argue that the difference was not that people were afraid of change but that they realistically anticipated its consequences, while the right was hiding their heads in the sand. As many here know, I think the opposite is true in the case of climate change, that it is the alarmists who are letting their ideology overpower their reason. But whether or not that is true for that issue — neither side of the argument can observe the future — we now have more than fifty years of data on population growth. Over that period what happened was the precise opposite of what was predicted. Population continued to grow, but poverty in poor countries declined sharply and calorie consumption per capita in poor countries grew instead of shrinking.
What the two cases had in common was fear, an extraordinary level of fear, of change.
If I had Klein’s email address I would have sent this to him. Since I don’t I’m posting it here. He may see it, and in any case others will.
One further, but not unrelated, point. A good deal of Klein’s analysis relies on studies purporting to show things, usually disturbing things, about people. We now know that some such studies were bogus, that the authors were falsely reporting their results. In other cases they were reporting what they probably believed, but their data showed less than they thought it did — I got involved in one such case, via an extended exchange with the author on my blog, some years back. I don’t know whether the same is true of the studies Klein cites and relies on, but I am less willing to trust their reported results than I would have been fifteen years or so back.
It can be interpreted both ways. The left is afraid of climate change, conservatives are afraid of the policy changes that would be necessary to prevent climate change.
I think you are mistakenly conflating two ideas of “[afraid of ] change.” I haven’t read the book, but my understanding from prior reading is that this phrase is something of a term of art and does not exactly correspond to a general language phrase “afraid of change.”
One could claim that someone is “afraid” of any unwanted change, but I don’t think that what the phrase is meant to mean. In the case of policy changes, there are a number of concrete expectations, as well as unknown risk factors, and many of the concrete expectations deal with things for which people have very definite preferences. The change is not a mere change of conditions, but a change between two well-understood conditions.
In the case of climate change, there are much larger error bars, more unknowns, and unknown values associated with certain outcomes (i.e. Given X amount of change, how does that affect a particular actor, and how does he subjectively evaluate his well-being in response? Even if X is known, he might have no good way to predict his subsequent well-being. This point is especially important due to the time scales involved, as it’s largely not that individual’s subjective judgement involved, but that of future generations.).
Consider risk in the stock market as an analogy. Risk can be categorized as systematic and idiosyncratic risk. Meta-afraid-of-change might be be broken down into systematic-afraid-of-change and idiosyncratic-afraid-of-change. The idiosyncratic change would be related to specific issues, which need to be considered but aren’t really the essential meaning of the “afraid of change” phrase. It’s the change qua change, the “systematic” change, that is the real object of consideration.
There are enormous unknowns and risks to the social chances that progressives tend to favor though. For example, if multiculturalism or integration of large numbers of migrants doesn’t work, you can get disintegrating countries or even civil war.
You can’t explain progressive worry about climate change by a worry about unknowns and then ignore how other huge risks tend to be waved away or taken in stride.
We have at least 50 years of data on climate change
ETA on second thoughts I’ll save all that for a fractious thread.
ditto.
Another way of segmenting people is between those who embrace spontaneous order/ Invisible hand / emergent order vs those who embrace planned change. IOW, Emergent change vs planned change.
This doesn’t so much capture the difference between liberals and conservatives, but between classical liberals and progressives.
@DavidFriedman says:
Maybe Ezra is correct but I’m doubtful of his analysis based on my own beliefs assuming conservative = more laissez faire/unregulated markets, and liberal = regulated markets/more statists (yes, that’s the opposite of the current Australian and the19th century usage of “liberal”, but we’re both Americans in the 21st century who remember the 20th).
To me the less regulated markets are the faster they bring change, and I don’t like change.
That the British, Indians, and Soviets kept manufacturing copies of 1920’s to ’50’s designs for bicycles and motor vehicles into the ’70’s and even the ’90’s seems glorious to me!
Unfortunately (judging from the reports of my ex-Soviet and ex-Warsaw Pact co-workers) actually existing socialism was terrible at producing needed supplies (never enough insulation to build a new building properly, shingles didn’t match the needed nails, etc.), but otherwise progress was effectively in amber, they were still making copies of a 1937 German motorcycle into the ’90’s!
The Indians made a ’50’s British car into the 21st century!
The Brits hardly changed the MGB from 1962 to ’80, or the Triumph Bonneville until Thatcher pulled the plug of the co-op in 1983!
That’s so cool!
There’s a sweet spot somewhere of enough capitalism to prevent bad central planning induced shortages, but enough socialistic regulation to inhibit disruption and “creative destruction” and stop all these newfangled innovations!
I know I would love if I could get a new Sunbeam Tiger off the show room floor that was just like the ones made the year before I was born!
Of course it took capitalism to get us the point of the products of 1967, but if we could’ve frozen it at that year it would’ve been glorious, and sure, not having the Instapot electric pressure cooker of this decade would be a drag, but wouldn’t you trade it for a brand-new ’67 Dodge Charger?
I know I would!
Plus, with less change you may plan your life and career with some confidence and security!
“The full Cuba” traps us in the ’50’s with a handful of cars from then, what we need is to freeze it in the mid to late ’60’s with the vehicles of then still rolling of the assembly line, with plentiful replacement parts, Radio Shack’s around still selling tubes to fix televisions, brass and bronze shower valves instead of today’s plastic crap, steam heat radiators (okay that’s ’20’s instead, but you get the gist), regulating the Hell out of markets should do the trick, we can’t expect government to be efficient, but we may expect a status quo bias, and it’s past time when change should’ve been slowed way down!
I appreciate older cars, but I would appreciate them more if they were in a museum rather than actually being used on the road. I just don’t like the smelly exhaust, leaded gasoline, low miles per gallon, lack of crash safety, etc.
@zardoz,
Safety and fuel efficiency?
Where’s the sport in that!?
More seriously, a bit more predictability, security, and stasis would be to my liking and I think we have enough innovation fueled disruption that society may spare some.
Would have preferred 2014 or so to be the freeze point for cars, myself. All of the safety and fuel efficiency improvements, none/less of the Internet of Things + Anti-Right-to-Repair bullshit.
At a tangent …
Klein provides evidence for your idea that the Republican/Democrat split is related to housing density.
@DavidFriedman,
Nice!
I have not read Klein’s book, so take my musings with a grain of salt.
I think a slightly more nuanced wording is more accurate. I would phrase it as: Liberals encourage changing how things are run wherease conservatives prefer to rely on how things have been done in the past. With this formulation, both examples match between theory and reality.
At least for european and european influenced countries, the general pattern has been exploitation of non-renewable natural resources (fuels, minings, deforestation). This has generally been pretty successful in the past (with some notable counter examples). So when the issue of climate change arises, conservatives would rather not change the trend.
And for population concerns, it is widely held that families were much larger in the past and are continuing to shrink. A conservative would seek to stop this trend so that families do not get any smaller. The fact that there are second order consequences to the total population is irrelevant, because that does not directly relate to how things are run.
While I don’t think ascribing the emotion “fear” is quite accurate, I do think the general point fits with reality. This description fits most of the main talking points of both sides. Eg women’s gender roles, drug prohibitions, teachings styles, etc.
A confounding factor could be population drift of intrinsic values. Assume people intrinsically fall into C type or L type. C types generally like what modern day conservatives like and L types generally like what modern day liberals like. For unspecified reasons, C types used to be more common but L types are on the rise. Because C types agree with the majority of the past, it looks like they want to stay the same. But in reality they just want C type values. And L types look like they are very comfortable with change, but if L type values were already dominant they would not want to budge.
I’m agnostic as to which of these is more accurate to the actual state of things.
@newstorkcity,
Eh, I don’t buy it, since futures are unknown most are reactionaries, just with different years in mind.
A left-winger would chose 1946 or 1976, while a right-winger would chose 1926 or 1986.
Those who “dream of what has never been” are rare, and a negligible part of the electorate that may be rounded down to zero in terms of political factions, the fight is over when to turn back the clock, and how to recover what has been lost, and how best to prevent the harms the future may bring.
I don’t believe that the average person knows enough about history to actually be reactionary for the time that matches their values. Or, at least, that they are only vaguely aware about it, not enough for them to actually care about it or try to emulate it.
Maybe I am just projecting here, I certainly don’t know enough about history to know what time if any was like what current left wing or right wing culture is.
Though perhaps you are arguing that while many individuals are not reactionary in the sense that they have a specific time to go back to, the cultural movement as a whole is reaching for some specific time period to emulate. I don’t understand by what mechanism that would even happen though.
As for “dream[ing] of what never has been,” maybe the average person can not conceive of a hypothetical future world (I am skeptical of this claim), but they can certainly see others dreams and choose to follow them.
I don’t think either group supports or opposes change in general.
The left supports directed change, social engineering, economical planning. They may range anywhere from incrementalism to revolutionism, depending on how quickly and forcefully they want to change things, but generally agree that some kind of public oversight is needed on change, and they usually more or less agree on the direction to steer the boat to.
The conservative right supports organic, emergent change. Don’t rock the boat, keep doing business as usual, and the Invisible Hand will keep giving you better and better stuff. The problem with this view is that “business as usual” means exponential growth, not just in population size (which was always the case since the Neolithic) but also in per capita levels of economic activity. Exponential growth, of course, either becomes unsustainable or creates qualitative differences that upset the social order: you can’t “go back to the 50s” in a world that has 3x the people and 9x the GDP. You can’t pretend that things like the refrigerator, the contraceptive pill, the TV, cheap air travel and the Internet did not create social and therefore political discontinuities. This fundamental contradiction is why, IMHO, the conservative ideology is dead.
Enter the populist right/alt-right/alt-lite/whatever you want to call the ideology that ranges from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán, from Nigel Farage to Jair Bolsonaro. This ideology embraces the leftist perspective that economic and technological change results in discontinuous social and political change, and that left “unregulated” (or rather, regulated by opaque institutions captured by illegible special interests) this change is mostly bad for most people. They strongly disagree with the left about the direction that this change should be directed to.
Anyway, this is a topic for a fractionally-numbered thread.
You also can’t pretend* that biological inequality, a fundamental human desire for conformity, a strong human desire for consumption, a fundamental human desire to ‘win,’ etc create social and therefore political discontinuities.
By your logic, the progressive agenda is just as dead as the conservative agenda, no?
Unless pushing society in a direction is a valid political agenda, in which case, neither conservatism or progressivism is dead.
* Well, you can, just as much as you can pretend that the refrigerator, the contraceptive pill, the TV, cheap air travel and the Internet don’t have a big impact.
No, the progressive agenda, in some respects, assumes that “a fundamental human desire for conformity, a strong human desire for consumption, a fundamental human desire to ‘win,’ etc create social and therefore political discontinuities,” and therefore believes that humans need to be regulated by a governing body to prevent them from defecting as per such desires.
You can describe conservatism in the same way.
@Aapje
Sure, progressive and conservatives may overlap on “we should change people’s cultures/minds,” but that’s not a rebuttal against viVI_IViv’s point on why the old conservativism was uniquely contradictory in the way progressivism was not. “People’s behaviors create social discontinuity” is not the mirror to “Material changes in technology (that occur because of desired business as usual) change people’s behaviors.” The claim that conservatives ignore that latter does not logically lead to the former, much less the former implying that therefore the progressive agenda is fatally contradictory.
I disagree that these contradictions necessarily exist as claimed. For example, the claim by viVI_IViv that conservatism requires fast economic growth is absurd. If anything, it is progressivism that requires this.
After all, at the core of conservatism is the claim that people desire things that are bad for them in the long term and that their life will ultimately be better if they restrain themselves and take responsibility. This is perfectly compatible with an economically stagnant society where the best outcome is when people shape themselves into a cog for the machine, which replaces an old cog that retires, to keep the system working.
In contrast, very many of the progressive wins were bought with economic growth: better welfare, better healthcare, more government services, more female independence, wealth redistribution, etc.
Remember that unions, feminism, and progressivism in general gained enormous momentum during the industrial revolution (as well as during the later automation phase), when economic growth increased a lot. Isn’t it then quite plausible that economic stagnation will cause the opposite? Progressivism often promises salvation after their next achievement. What happens if the economy stagnates and progressives can no longer buy achievements? A backlash seems quite plausible.
Many of the social and political discontinuities are not obviously robust, in the sense that they are safe from a political course correction. We’ve seen plenty of historic cases where such course corrections happened and there is no reason to assume that society will keep marching in the same direction, especially if the economy keeps stagnating or the stagnation becomes even worse.
After all, the stagnating economy of the 80’s already caused the mainstream left to adopt neoliberalism and to substantially pivot away from redistribution towards Social Justice, which is a deeply inconsistent ideology.
—
Take working women. Having this as the ideal and as something that (middle and upper class) people increasingly depend on, is a major change from the past. Yet women don’t report being happier. They don’t tend to actually want to sacrifice as much for work as men, but then also often get upset about not getting the same benefits or about spending their paycheck on daycare, creating a great dissatisfaction in many. As Warren wrote in her book, double incomes tend to result in more fixed expenses for the family, actually increasing financial risk compared to a single-income household (and the increased tendency for people to separate makes it even worse).
We see that progressives are trying to get women into top positions and failing. To equalize earnings and failing. To equalize housework and failing. To increase the financial situation of mothers and failing, as more and more mothers are single mothers.
Then how can you or viVI_IViv claim that the conservative agenda is fatally contradictory, but that the progressive one isn’t? Do you claim that it is inevitable that the solutions that progressives keep trying will suddenly ‘take’ or that a new solution will be found that will fix it?
Of course, if politics pivots back to trying far more conservative solutions, it won’t be the same conservatism of the past, but the same is true for progressivism. Again, if not being able to return to the exact same conservatism shows up conservatism, then why not progressivism as well?
My point is that conservatism is a hands-off approach: keep doing whatever you have always being doing and things will be fine.
If you do this in, say, the Middle Ages then chances are that you’ll be leaving to you grandchildren a society that looks pretty much the same as the one that your grandparents left you.
But in our late industrial society, this results in unchecked transformative change due to fast economical and technological growth.
Progressivism doesn’t require fast growth per se, it requires abundance, and our present abundance has been generated by fast growth.
If most people are poor subsistence farmers, ruled by warriors, then there is nothing to redistribute, and since men are better at farming and fighting with that kind of technology, the idea of women being equal to men makes no sense.
If the economic and military strength of a society is mainly a function of the number of people in it, and if there are recurrent outbreaks of diseases like the plague and leprosy, there is no way that people who primarily engage in sterile sexual acts with a large number of partners to be seen as anything but dangerous degenerates.
Of course progressivism is also at odds with the physical world even in our modern society, and these contradictions are, IMHO, the reason why it is in cultural decline. Progressivism is based on the idea that people are fundamentally equal: differences of outcomes must be the cause of some kind of unfairness in the system that can, and must, be corrected. People are starting to become more and more aware that this is not true: people are fundamentally different at both individual and group level, given equal opportunities some people will succeed and other will fail.
I think that you are confusing not wanting to change the rules of the game with being hands-off, which is not the same. Preserving the status quo can be a hands-on affair. After all, many progressives who argue that historic society was oppressive claim that there would be an intervention when people would try to exercise certain freedoms, right?
In general, getting ‘hands-on’ to try to prevent changes is perfectly consistent with a strong desire to “keep doing whatever you have always being doing.”
Progressivism is the dominant ideology but it’s declining, while the populist right ideology is ascending.
Progressivism is still entrenched in institutions with high inertia and high barriers to entry, but go anywhere people can say un-PC things without fear of repercussions, anywhere they can vote with their vallet (“get woke go broke”) or they can vote with their actual vote, and you can clearly see that the populist right, or at least anti-PC sentiment is ascendent.
Yeah, if you don’t need an education or a job at a company with lots of progressive customers, or want to go to a conference or don’t mind risking being targeted by the institution called the courts that can force anyone to do what they want, then you can say and do what you want, without fear of repercussions.
Well, except for the fact that of the last four Dutch populist party leaders, one had his wife lose her leg due to an antifa attack, one was murdered and two need security due to death threats (including by a very non-fired university teacher, who called upon the person who committed the aforementioned murder to kill another populist party leader).
Also, people are forced to give a substantial amount of their money to the government, which means that they can’t vote with their wallet with that.
The evidence that populists feel bullied into silence is pretty strong, including that they are very prone to lie about their preferences, causing their secret vote to usually diverge significantly from pre-election or exit polling (Hello, unexpected Trump victory).
Ultimately, populists keep saying that their lived experience is being oppressed for their beliefs. To get more objective evidence for or against this, they would need a fair shake by the institutions that, according to you, have “progressivism still entrenched” and high inertia and high barriers to entry.
However, I would argue that these institutions are heavily biased, so those barriers of entry are not impartial, but they prevent a course correction. For example, Bo Winegard was just fired for wrongthink that at worst was mildly racist by gesturing to some groups being less capable, while hateful racism like this by an assistant professor is apparently considered acceptable). Imagine a white professor writing about wanting to kick a black homeless person in the face because of sins associated with his skin color.
This is not just about PC. The choice is between defending institutions that accept these kind of things, as long as they target their outgroup, while they don’t accept things that are way, way less noxious, but that target their ingroup.
But this is what I mean by progressives being entrenched: they use the power of the institutions to protect themselves and attack their opponents, from a company or a university firing people for wrongthink, to the police punishing people for mean (= right-wing) tweets, while lefties can call for murder on Twitter without repercussions, to the police looking the other way while the antifa commit acts of terrorism while swiftly punishing any “far-right extremist” who dares to fight back.
This is the result of 40+ years of leftist entryism, as well as the unholy alliance between the ultra-elites and the radicals (it’s not a coincidence that the first result of the woke movement was breaking up Occupy).
Still, the progressives are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. This puts them in an unstable position: a class of political commissars hated by the general population could perhaps maintain itself in a completely totalitarian system like North Korea or the Stalin-era Soviet Union, but in Western societies, as long as democratic and market mechanisms are still operational, they can’t go on forever. At some point, the institutions they co-opted will need the support of either elected officials or paying customers, and if they can’t get it they will have to either un-wokefy themselves or collapse.
Sure, but what we call democracy often in reality results in leaders with a substantially different agenda and/or who make substantially different decisions than the will of the people, for various reasons, including that the very institutions that shape the process and that interpret what the voters actually meant are not impartial & because the policy-making process is not impartial (being biased in favor of political leaders with a certain agenda and biased against other agendas).
For example, the Brexit only happened because of a weird combination of hubris and deference, where a politician decided that he didn’t need the power of those institutions to reshape the actual will of the majority into something ‘acceptable’ because they would vote right, but who didn’t cancel the outcome of the referendum when it didn’t go as planned. In contrast, in my country the politicians in power started off with the same hubris that voters would support the elite, but when they didn’t, the politicians simply ignored the rejection of the EU ‘constitution’ and stopped doing referendums. Problem solved…for now.
Also, propaganda that doesn’t directly conflict with people’s own experiences often does work. Russians tend to distrust their government, yet they largely bought Putin’s MH17 lies.
Ultimately, I again come back to hubris. An elite that accepts that the will of the majority of people is different from their own can permanently bias society towards their own desires, as long as they lack the hubris where they want to have it completely their way, rather than get far more than they deserve. Only when they themselves start a war with a large part of society, where they lack the means to win that war, they doom themselves.
Similarly, the media and other propaganda channels can create a substantial bias in favor of their views, but if their hubris makes them tell people to stop believing their own lying eyes, they go further than their means allows.
My suspicion is that politics is largely cultural and which issues end up in which camps is almost random.
I think that there are underlying biases, but that issues tend to have so many aspects, that many can go either way.
An interesting aspect is that when one side adopts a cause, they often frame it in a way that works for their biases/preferences, but conflicts with the biases/preferences of the other side, which polarizes the issue, especially if one side has media dominance. That is (another case) where having strong control over the propaganda being published can actually work against a cause, because it makes people believe that:
– the only reason(s) for the cause are those that resonate with the other, while reasons that resonate with ‘us’ don’t exist or are not sincerely advocated, but merely offered up to manipulate
– the cause is part of a package deal and thus that advocating for the cause will bring about the goal(s) of those whose goals ‘we’ oppose.
You can see these mechanisms work pretty clearly in how people respond to causes, in a way that often confuses the other side. For example, by the critic complaining about a larger agenda that is (allegedly) being advocated for, which can seem like dragging in unrelated topics to the other side.
Reminds me of the stories I’ve heard about conservative environmentalists who like to be able to go hunting and fishing
I don’t know if I’m misreading this statement, but it sounds like you’re considering these environmentalists who like to hunt and fish as some semi-mythical group. Hunters and fishers have been a leading part of environmentalism and conservation efforts for a long, long time.
You just don’t notice them because they’re the other tribe and they have different branding (conservation as opposed to environmentalism).
Also because they wear camouflage.
I wasn’t saying they were mythical. Just that they aren’t visible in the mainstream due to political pressure.
This is definitely a bubble thing, I’m guessing you live in one of the larger urban areas of the country. I see these kinds of people in public and various media sources all the time (but I live in a mid-sized blue urban area in a state that is mostly red with a lot of rural areas).
I’m fairly left myself, but I think the phrase “afraid of change” applied to conservatives is poisoning the well somewhat. Conservatives have a preference against change – that’s kind of what ‘conservative’ means, preferring to keep things the way they are. Progressives have a preference in favour of change because they have a belief that if you change what you’re doing you’re more likely to get something better than something worse – that’s kind of what ‘progressive’ means too.
Phrased like that, the conservative and progressive positions on climate change and population make perfect sense. Conservatives are trying to keep their own personal life circumstances as close as possible to what they’re used to which means not changing what they do in their day to day life (and, if you’re a conservative this will give you a bias in favour of thinking that no bad things are ever going to happen which you might need to change for – and you should look out for that). Progressives are trying to experiment with new things in order to improve their lives (and, if you’re a progressive this will give you a bias in favour of thinking that whatever change you have in mind is bound to have all up-sides and no down-sides – and you should look out for that) which means more looking into the future, trying to figure out what’s changing, and responding to that.
In any particular circumstances, you don’t necessarily know who’s going to be right about a particular proposed change. Maybe it makes things better for everyone, maybe it makes things worse for everyone, maybe it’s just a change and all the progressives are saying “Hey! New stuff! Cool” and the conservatives are all “FML not more goddamn NEW shit!”
I take a bit of an issue with calling it “trying to experiment” when it is often actually a society-wide change, which often cannot be undone and/or is not rigorously evaluated, where reverting back is presented as a viable option.
In general, I associate a willingness to experiment more with centrists or center-right (on my scale, where someone like Dominic Cummings is center-right). The far left typically seems extremely unwilling to experiment, preferring to just make the change. The center-left often seems theoretically willing, but very commonly seems to have a low threshold for proof, preferring to switch from experiment to implementation based on, in my view, insufficient evidence for efficacy. I agree with you that far more conservative people are relatively often not very willing to experiment, nor to just make the change.
I’d agree that the far-left are often locked into positions that they can’t or are unwilling to break out of – I’d attribute it to a theory that if you’re the far-anything you’ve pretty much tacked your colours to the mast, and would find it difficult to back down without losing face (due to being part of a relatively small group in society, with whom most people disagree)
You are assuming that “conservative” and “progressive” mean what the words imply, which is risky. Everyone is a progressive in the literal sense of the word, since everyone is in favor of those changes that are progress, i.e. improve things. It’s just that I think cutting the size of the government in half and returning our legal rules to freedom of contract is progress, and other people think changes in the opposite direction are progress.
Similarly for “conservative.” Currently, conservatives are pushing for less immigration, much less than the essentially open borders that the U.S. had for most of its history. Liberals want something closer to that past policy, so if they aren’t conservative they are reactionary. Liberals very much want to conserve the New Deal policies.
The names have become labels for ideologies, having only a weak connection to what the words mean.
@DavidFriedman says:
So very much +1!
How many Cambridge professors does it take to change a lightbulb?
CHANGE?!?!?!?!?!
If social distancing measures and increased hygiene intensity work well against COVID-19, they should work well against the “ordinary” seasonal flu and colds as well, unless there’s some difference I’ve missed. Thus we should see a significant drop in prevalence of ordinary cold/flu symptoms in areas where these measures have been in effect for awhile. Do we in fact have evidence of such drops? Or is it too early to tell? Or are the relevant data unavailable or too noisy/confounded for the effects to show up clearly?
There does seem to be strong evidence of this in Hong Kong.
Wow, that’s exactly what I was looking for, and indeed hoping for; far better that we do all this for some real gain than for nothing. Thanks!
I’d love to believe this but I wonder how much of this can be explained by people just avoiding healthcare settings for anything but critical conditions right now.
Though if you had respiratory symptoms and testing was available I guess you’d go…
People here probably know this, but if you think you have the flu or COVID, call your doctor or a clinic, don’t go visit your doctor or a clinic.
I watched yesterday’s press conference, and I don’t think that was mentioned. (Possibly because many Americans don’t have a doctor.)
Can you call a doctor’s office and actually talk to a doctor?
IME the only person you’re allowed to actually talk to is the receptionist, whose entire scope of duties is booking appointments and who can tell you nothing useful aside from when the next available appointment is (spoilers, not today!)
If you have health insurance, another option is to call your insurance company’s Nurse Advice Line. It’s one of the phone numbers on the back of your insurance card. You’ll talk to a registered nurse who will triage whether you need to go to a doctor and how urgently (i.e. call your regular doctor’s office and make an appointment, or go to a walk-in clinic today, or go directly to your local hospital’s emergency room).
@Matt M:
Sample size of one but: I once had an ear infection that was misdiagnosed as an eustacion tube disorder. I called my doctor’s office, and was put on hold, then told to go see an ENT. So sometimes the receptionist will at least consult with the doctor for you.
Presumably the receptionist can at least warn the doctor that a patient with respiratory symptoms plans to come in – let’s make sure everyone in the waiting room has masks on first.
I talked to a doctor over the phone today. I needed a prescription refilled, and didn’t want to actually go to a doctor’s office. Turns out my insurance uses a service called MD Live, where I got on the app and explained what I needed and paid my $20 copay, and then a doctor called me about five minutes later to talk about the drug I was wanting a refill on, and then she called it in to my pharmacy.
Another time I talked to a doctor on the phone was when I was still with Kaiser (an HMO). I badly sprained my ankle and called to make an appointment. My doctor wasn’t available, so the receptionist found a different one that had an opening. A few minutes later he called me to talk about what I did, and he told me just to go straight to imaging, because he wouldn’t really be able to do anything in the office. I went and got an x-ray, and the tech told me to wait in the lobby. A few minutes later, the doctor called me again, told me I didn’t break it, and that I should wrap it and ice it. I would also do most of my interactions with my primary doctor through email, and would only see him once a year.
Some of the other replies in the Twitter thread try to discuss this.
What’s the cost-benefit trade-off that makes this reaction appropriate for COVID-19 but not appropriate for seasonal flu?
(The subtext is that maybe one of our reactions is wrong. I have no idea how to determine it, though.)
I don’t think its CBA that makes us do one thing for COVID and another for the tons of other viruses whose impact can be limited in a similar way and have consequences that aren’t insignificant. It’s the immediacy and novelty of COVID that gets us to do things that we should probably be doing anyways. “New thing that can kill you” perks up our ears in the same way that “same thing that killed people a while ago and will kill people again next year” doesn’t. Same reason people don’t always wear seat belts.
If you wanted to get into a CBA, the big reason to limit the speed of COVID spread is to keep our health care system capacity from being overwhelmed. (Relevant graphic.)
I see two factors that cut in favor of reacting like this to COVID-19 but not for seasonal flu.
The first is COVID-19 seems to produce severe illnesses about an order of magnitude more often than seasonal flu: for COVID-19, ~10% of infections require hospitalization and ~2% kill the patient, compared to 1-1.5% hospitalization and 0.05-0.1% death rates per infection for seasonal flu. So if COVID-19 spreads as far as a seasonal flu, as seems likely if we take no extraordinary precautions, that means millions of hospitalizations and hundreds of thousands of deaths in a country the size of the US. It’s also significant that we’re not very confident of our estimates for hospitalization and death rates for COVID-19: they could be a lot lower then we currently think (as occurred with the 2009 Pig Flu pandemic), or they could be even higher.
The other is that COVID-19 is a novel virus, not currently in general circulation and probably only entrenched in its one original animal reservoir. So by responding aggressively now, we have a chance to eradicate it. But if we let it run rampant, the usual pattern for widespread communicable diseases is for them to circulate endemically at a low level and periodically explode into epidemics as new strains evolve around immunity or when new generations of people who’ve never had the disease reach a critical mass. Even if COVID-19 were to turn out to be no worse than seasonal flu, it’d be a defensible tradeoff if the level of effort we’re expending against COVID-19 had a real chance of permanently eradicating influenza after a single flu season.
Also, existing seasonal flu can be partially mitigated by vaccine. COVID-19 doesn’t have one yet.
Along with vaccines, there’s also some level of immunity in the population for flu, but probably not for COVID-19.
Back of the envelope calculation.
If these diseases are basically the same, so that an infected person in a naive population will spread it to two others before recovering, then an endemic flu must be such that half the population already has immunity, in order not to be having exponential growth. The only stationary state for this differential equation is if the number of people who get the flu each year is half of the number of new people in the population each year.
If social distancing means that an infected person in a naive population spreads it to 1.5 others before recovering, then we will eventually settle in a new equilibrium where 1/3 of people have had it, and the number of people that get it each year is 1/3 of the number of new people in the population. That is a moderate reduction in disease burden.
But with a novel disease, to which no one in the community has immunity, it seems likely that there will be a period of nearly exponential growth, until the virus has infected nearly half the population. At that moment, the number of people with the virus will still be substantially higher than the number in the eventual steady state. My intuition about this sort of differential equation is that the solution will involve overshoot and fallback over many years, before eventually stabilizing at the steady state.
By reducing the effective infection rate from 2 to 1.5 early in the progression, we can make sure that the overshoot is smaller, causing less disruption in this peak, in addition to achieving the moderate reduction in disease burden long term.
But I think mitigating this peak is the primary goal, and it’s something we don’t have to worry about for endemic diseases that have already been established.
[Post 7 reviewing Business Adventures]
Previously: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3, Post 4, Post 5, Post 6
The next chapter of Business Adventures, “The Impacted Philosophers” is a relatively short one about price fixing at General Electric.
During the 1950s, GE participated in a cartel whose goal was to prop up the prices of gear produced for the electrical grid. By 1960, someone defected from the cartel, and the government went after the remaining members for violating the Sherman antitrust act. This chapter doesn’t focus on how the cartel worked. Instead, the focus is on GE’s successful attempt to insulate its senior leadership from blame. Actually, “attempt” is probably the wrong word, since GE succeeded. As Brooks writes, “the uppermost echelon at GE came through [the investigation] unscathed.”
The higher-ups at GE defended themselves mainly on the grounds that they didn’t know what their subordinates were doing. The whole affair is a bit reminiscent of Volkswagen’s efforts to pin Dieselgate on “a small group of rogue engineers.”
The details are amusing. GE had in place a “Directive Policy 20.5” which specifically forbade price fixing (among other things) but “when some executives orally conveyed, or reconveyed the order, they were apparently in the habit of accompanying it with an unmistakable wink.” These guys are lucky that email hadn’t been invented yet.
Supposedly, the custom of winking declined over the years, and the Chairman of GE even described himself as “an antiwink man.” However, his subordinates still engaged in price fixing.
Near the end of the chapter, Brooks sardonically concludes that “philosophy seems to have reached a high point at GE, and communication a low one. If executives could just learn to understand each other, most of the witnessess said or implied, the problem of antitrust violations would be solved.”
This chapter was fun to read, but it would have been nice to have a little more context. How big a percentage of GE’s business was electrical equipment? How credible really were the denials of the higher-ups? In a sense, the higher-ups were punished simply because GE suffered financially because of the antitrust actions. But in another sense– that of criminal responsibility– I feel like I still have some doubts about whether justice was done.
I can’t tell if this is a sarcastic metaphor about their practices or if he’s trying to say that people were literally winking at each other all the time in 1950s era GE.
It sure sounds like the latter, and I really hope that is the case.
I mean, that does kind of sound like peak ’50s doesn’t it?
My father once taught a business ethics class at a not-very-elite college. The curriculum they gave him wanted him to teach these kids about Kant and Mill and try to apply the categorical imperative to business scenarios. Yawn.
He quickly scrapped that and mostly gave kids examples like these — “If you follow an unethical command that comes from above, don’t be surprised when they save their own hides by throwing you under the bus.” Which I suppose is as good a way as any to dissuade unethical behavior, unless that student manages to become the high-level exec, at which point it becomes an instruction manual.
But as I said, it was a pretty low-ranked college.
One of my COs in the Navy had a good policy (that he followed himself, but also insisted we all follow as well) of “any time someone gives you an order or request that sounds even the least bit shady, demand they send it in writing, signed by someone you know.”
Nearly half the time we got requests, by phone, from our superior command, when we asked them to send the request in writing (email is fine!), they never bothered. Was sort of eye-opening…
Biweekly Naval Gazing links post:
The big thing over the past two weeks has been the launch of a new series on merchant shipping, with an introduction and the first part, covering passenger ships.
On the other end of the spectrum, I also looked at the early history of auxiliary ships, in the era before my first part on the subject.
Lastly, I put up pictures from my collection of Iowa’s enlisted mess facilities.
Random COVID-19 thought:
I’m finding it disturbing to watch as people dither about making any decisions. Where I live, we have at least four known cases, and we should have closed the schools today. My guess is that it will take another couple weeks for the decisionmakers to wrangle their way to a decision, at which point, COVID-19 will have already spread extensively through the schools. Probably we should shut down local theaters, concerts, etc., as well.
I hope there are people thinking about how to expand number of beds for patients and deal with overflow. As an example, in my area, there are a gazillion urgent cares. I suspect it would be smart to designate a couple as non-respiratory-illness-only centers, so people with broken bones or other urgent problems could handle them without going to a hospital full of COVID-19. I’m not sure how you enforce that, but it makes sense to do it.
There are also a lot of unused hotel rooms right now, so maybe renting blocks of rooms and setting them up as makeshift medical suites for quarantined people or sick-but-not-critical people would make sense. It might also keep the hotel industry from collapsing, which might be nice. The restaurant industry is probably going to collapse. Maybe they can stay afloat somehow with deliveries? But you still need some way to ensure that the employees aren’t contaminating the food and that the delivery driver isn’t exposing you to something nasty. You can imagine mechanisms to try to do this, but it’s hard to see our (extremely wealthy, well-staffed, highly-educated) county being flexible and fast-moving enough to make such decisions, and it’s easy to imagine any such decisions getting tangled up in several years of lawsuits and restraining orders that ensure they won’t be effective. But I can’t help thinking that hiring someone to sit in a room with each delivery driver and restaurant cook for ten minutes and send anyone coughing/sneezing home with pay, plus checking their temperatures, would make this kind of thing workable.
From my point of view I can’t understand why so many people online are freaking out about COVID19. It seems obvious to me that it’s probably not going to be a big deal in the US, and I’m mostly worried about the economic effects. So from my point of view doing things like closing the schools because 4 people have COVID19 is exactly the kind of alarm-ism that might damage the economy more than necessary.
When I reflect on why I’m not worried It’s hard to pinpoint. Most likely it’s because I remember people getting scared of SARS, Swine Flu, and Bird Flu, and none of those amounted to much of anything. I know intellectually that previous scares mean very little about this current virus, any more than the fact that just because a mine has never collapsed before doesn’t mean it won’t today. But my priors on a Spanish Flu type pandemic have been set extremely low by experience.
I’m not saying any of this to say I’m right, and if I am right I’ll be right mostly by luck (what do I know anyway, that I should be so confident?). I just want to give some context as to why so many people might be dithering. They just don’t think it’s going to be that bad.
I’m with you in being a bit taken aback by the panic (and in not trusting my own intuitions much). I took a week long media break, so the transition from “we need to keep an eye on this Chinese disease” to “well, the markets–financial and Costco–have crashed” took me rather by surprise.
I don’t know, how much of the panic is numerology of the sort “there was a pandemic in 1920 too!” and how much of the sort “4000 casualties in the first 3 months represents an estimated X00,000 in the next 6 months”?
With due respect, I have got literally no idea what world you guys have been living in. In the world I’m living in, the disease is highly contagious and deadly enough to kill millions of elderly and immune-compromised people in the US alone, the CDC and FDA have been worse than useless, Trump has been casting the whole thing as a conspiracy against his presidency with total complicity from the media, and other countries are resorting to far more extreme measures than we are and still failing to contain it.
You don’t have to read tea leaves or engage in complicated Bayesian weighing of evidence about the Spanish flu or swine flu. Just look at the death rates already observed and multiply by our population and expected infection rate. And multiply that number by several times to get the number of severe cases, which will totally overwhelm our hospitals. There are factors which reduce that—we have better lungs in the US, more young people, better doctors—but none of those will reduce the number much. If that doesn’t concern you, nothing else I say will.
I think you are right, and people are reacting appropriately by closing schools.
But I’m not sure about it. People get taken by panics and feel compelled to do the “1) something must be done 2) this is something 3) therefore this must be done” fallacy.
I saw someone with high credentials on Twitter say “China did this to stop it, and therefore what China did is needed to what’s stop it,” which has a bunch of assumptions baked in. Those assumptions might be right, but they might not be, either.
And, strangely, it doesn’t.
I could go off on a bunch of arguments against your points but I feel like it would be a distraction from the main point, which is that I’m not scared one bit about the Coronavirus. And reading your post didn’t change that. I don’t think it’s going to be that bad.
I want to be clear that this is not a position I reasoned my way into, which is fascinating. I can certainly come up with arguments to justify how I feel, but they are superfluous. I feel like someone who just read all the statistics on car accidents and then happily gets in my car to commute. Nothing you said feels real.
I’ve heard it said that people come to positions first and then come up with arguments to defend them. I don’t know if that’s true for everything, but it’s certainly true for me in this case. I’m not sure why but I am convinced that the fears are overblown. The human mind is a funny thing, isn’t it?
@Nick wrote:
A world in which a plague ship is docked at the port of my hometown, passengers ordered to stay on, and a world where it’s time to dust off old songs: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w5lA4EiWJsc (at about the 11 to 15 minute mark)
♪♫♪♫ In the year of 19 and 18, God sent a mighty disease.
It killed many a-thousand, on land and on the seas.
Great disease was mighty and the people were sick everywhere.
It was an epidemic, it floated through the air.
The doctors they got troubled and they didn’t know what to do.
They gathered themselves together, they called it the Spanish flu.
Soldiers died on the battlefield, died in the counts too.
Captain said to the lieutenant, “I don’t know what to do.”
Well, we done told you, our God’s done warned you,
Jesus coming soon.
Well, God is warning the nation, He’s a-warning them every way.
To turn away from evil and seek the Lord and pray.
Well, the nobles said to the people, “You better close your public schools.”
“Until the events of death has ending, you better close your churches too.”♪♫♪♫
-Blind Willie Johnson “Jesus is coming soon” first recorded 1928
@FLWAB-
It would probably be helpful if you described what “that bad” meant to you. (In the context of your belief that this “won’t be that bad”.)
@FLWAB
Just checking your age? If I was 35 I don’t think I would be worried about myself. But I am 72, and it has gotten my attention.
@FLWAB
That’s probably the default reaction. It makes a lot of sense from both an evolutionary and a Bayesian perspective. The former because people around you don’t really panic that much, and socially you don’t have a license to do so. And Bayesian, you have a lot of previous evidence that this kind of thing blows over and usually doesn’t affect at all your corner of the world, so it takes extraordinary evidence to make you change your mind – evidence which you haven’t seen yet.
There’s a pretty interesting discussion we could have on whether intellectual evidence is really that strong, from a brain-Bayesian POV. The truth is, when we have novel ideas that go against the conventional wisdom, we’re more often wrong than not. It takes a long history of going against the grain and being right to build up the confidence to actually act on your hypothesis. That’s one of the components of leadership, btw – to act on your ideas when people around you still look at each other for social clues. But it’s rare. Even in a highly intellectual place like this.
Except the CDC is still calling the risk to America “low,” and the reported mortality rates can only be vastly overstated when there are obviously plenty of other people who contract the illness but it isn’t bad enough for them to seek medical care and be tested.
Trump is not calling the virus itself a conspiracy, but is critical of the media alarmism about the virus.
I really don’t think the virus itself is going to be that big of a deal, but the overreaction to it will be. I think Trump is doing the right thing by telling people to be careful and wash their hands and what not, but not to freak out.
@Nick
I would be patently shocked to see millions of deaths in the US, even if we re-opened everything that had closed/canceled and didn’t close anything else going forward.
The most pessimistic estimate I’ve seen (from medical organizations who’s job it is to plan for the worst case scenario) is something like 500,000 deaths and I think even that is extremely unlikely.
@acymetric-
I tend to agree, though it’s tough to disentangle “COVID is getting tons of media coverage and people are all taking precautions like avoiding travel and large gatherings” from “there won’t be a ton of people that die from this”. I have no trouble believing that a million could die if we’d just ignored it, but at this point, “coronavirus” is the first word off everyone’s tongue, whether I’m talking to my parents, co-workers, or folks at social gatherings.
So IDK. I expect basic things like everyone stopping travel, avoiding sporting events (the San Jose Sharks’ home arena basically said the games are canceled, for example) and conferences getting canceled to do a lot to limit the spread of the disease.
It really comes down to what you consider the “null case”. Left completely ignored? Up to 6 million deaths in the US doesn’t seem entirely absurd. But there’s no scenario where it’s completely ignored, particularly by the media who I’m sure are getting lots of clicks and views on this subject.
@matthewravery
Right, and I certainly don’t advocate ignoring it, doing absolutely nothing, and pretending everything will be find. I just want a little moderation in the reaction, or at least a willingness to say “ok, maybe the costs of doing [x] to prevent spread are higher than the benefits”.
Although 6 million in the US is still far too high IMO. That basically assumes 2% mortality rate and 100% infection rate for the US population. I guess I would say it almost literally could not be any worse than that, but I would also say that it almost certainly would never get that bad under any plausible circumstances.
Even removed from the death/infection rates, I’ve never seen a disease have as much impact on my work as COVID19 has.
Our office is preparing to shift entirely towards having everyone telework, so far 5 separate conferences that were pretty critical to our mission have been cancelled and basically all planning for the rest of the year has been scrapped.
Take the fact that this is a disease off the table – I would deem anything that caused this much disruption as a major event that’s was worth being concerned about.
@Aftagley
Is that Beyesian reasoning? That is, all that disruption is a sign that something serious is happening? Or do you mean that the disruption itself is worth being concerned about even if it is unreasonable? Because that sounds like a feedback loop or tautology or something.
One way or another, it’s definitely a big event at this point, no one is arguing that.
And I wouldn’t be saying “See, that was nothing!” even if it turned out we didn’t have an epidemic here. It might be like y2k, where reasonable but unusual precautions prevented some significant harms, and some other imagined harms were the result of speculation, with it being unclear to the lay person which was which.
If the coronavirus is ignored, which was matthewravery’s stipulation, then 6 million is not unrealistic; remember that our hospitals can’t remotely manage that many cases, so there will be many preventable deaths, among coronavirus patients and others.
On the contrary, your 500,000 estimate, @acymetric, requires both a very optimistic fatality rate (say, 0.7%) and a very optimistic infection rate (say, 20%). I think both numbers will in reality be higher. The numbers that have me worried are fatalities 1 to 3 million, with infections around 50% of the country and 1-2% fatalities.
On the contrary, your 500,000 estimate, @acymetric, requires both a very optimistic fatality rate (say, 0.7%) and a very optimistic infection rate (say, 20%). I think both numbers will in reality be higher.
There’s a good chance that seasonality effects will limit the virus’s spread and lead to a relatively low number of total deaths. (There’s decent evidence that the virus does not thrive in warm weather. If social distancing types of measures slow the virus’s spread, then maybe we in the US can make it to summer before the virus really takes off.) But by “good chance” I mean something like 70%; the remaining 30% of scenarios can be really really bad. My confidence intervals on this are *really* wide.
@Nick
Not my estimate. Talk to the AHA and NETEC.
Either way, I stand by my contention that “millions” of deaths (as claimed by you) and 6 million+ deaths (as claimed by @matthewraverly) are both wild overestimates.
Note that my number is actually based on information from the medical industry, while yours is…speculation? Conjecture?
@RandyM
I just mean that at this point I could emerge from this outbreak completely fine, noone I know could get infected and heck, mana could rain down from the heavens to cure everyone of this disease and this would still likely be one of the most disruptive events I’ve seen in my decade or so of professional life.
I admit, my work is internationally focused, so I’m arguably predisposed to get hit by these kinds of disruptions, but still. I think that not being worried about the disease, like the top-level post was nominally about, is no longer a reasonable stance; you can not worry about the severity of infection, but the disruptions caused by this event are worth being concerned about, at least IMO.
(ETA: I’m not trying to claim we disagree here, I’m pretty sure we are on the same page)
@Aftagley
Right, I think the claim is that some, and maybe a significant portion of this disruption is unnecessary/self-inflicted by knee-jerk overreactions fed by panic and CYA shifted into overdrive.
@acymetric
I can hardly talk to them when you don’t cite your sources.
If you have in mind Lawler’s estimate, that wasn’t a worst case scenario but a “best guess” forecast for which to prepare. It did not provide its assumptions about how we limit the spread of the disease—in other words, how concentrated the cases may be in time—and the AHA said it did not reflect their views. Did you have something else in mind?
Who cares? I’m claiming that, at this point, the cause doesn’t matter. The effects are real and arguably compounding.
A friend of mine has had a small business that has failed because of COVID-related disruptions. The work my office does has been set back already at least 6 months, possibly longer due to this stuff. We’re almost certainly going to be changing our hiring schedule as a result.
It sounds as though you are assuming a death rate of at least one percent. I think that’s pessimistic. The figures we are getting use the number of infections detected as the denominator hence omit all people with very mild infections, and probably some with significant infections. And they are mostly for parts of the world where people are substantially poorer than in the U.S., hence less able to take it easy when they think they may be coming down with something.
Nope, that’s what I was looking at. The AHA should probably have asked him not to put their logo on the slide if they didn’t endorse the information.
As far as “best guess” I understand that is the description given, but it is coming from a place where every incentive is to overestimate.
@Aftagley
It certainly matters, because we are still making decisions that are making the economic impacts worse, and it would probably be good for us to stop doing that. It won’t undo the damage done, but it will stop us from further driving the economy into the ground unnecessarily. I don’t understand why you think that wouldn’t matter?
Hmm, I think we might be having different conversations right now. My apologies if I wasn’t clear:
I think the topic of conversation in this subthread is “should we be highly concerned about COVID”
to that question my answer is “Yes; it’s effects and ramifications on my life have already been really substantial” even though I don’t personally know anyone who’s been infected. Like I said earlier, it could be cured tomorrow and it would already be the second-or-third most disruptive event I’ve had to deal with during my career. That already puts it on the level of “the government shutdown” and “major hurricanes.”
If it gets any worse, or if the reactions to it continue to intensify, this will be the most disruptive event I’ve ever personally experienced. All in all, this makes me very concerned, since I tend to dislike disruption and nothing I’m reading about makes it seem like this crisis has already reached its peak.
I mean, I’m not making decisions to increase the economic impact. I’m just stocking up on rice beans and TP.
@acymetric-
To be clear, I don’t expect 6 million Americans to die. As I said, that was what could happen if we ignored the disease completely and it was on the upper end of lethality and infectiousness. I was responding to your comment where you said, “The most pessimistic estimate I’ve seen… is something like 500,000 deaths.”
Frankly, I think even 500,000 is unlikely because local governments and businesses appear to be taking strong measures these days and the virus is getting wall-to-wall coverage on the news. These steps alone will do a lot to reduce the spread and help keep the medical system from being overwhelmed. People who can’t get tested but think they might’ve been exposed are self-quarantining. Individuals and businesses are canceling unnecessary travel.
The degree to which this is all necessary isn’t obvious, but such a potent reaction, delayed as it was in this country, will certainly reduce the effect of the virus from a deaths-and-infections perspective.
I’m curious what the people who think COVID isn’t worth the hype think about reports like this. It sounds like Italian hospitals have practically become a warzone.
Italy is clearly an outlier. Hopefully when this is all through someone will make it their business to find out why. I’m looking at the JHU board and it shows Italy with over 10,000 infections whereas no other Western country has over 2000.
One thing is that human populations aren’t lily ponds. An outbreak doesn’t necessarily spread evenly; it can quickly saturate a local well-connected population, but then it hits limits and can only spread more slowly to other populations. So we see New York with 173 cases — but more than half of them are in communities closely connected to one particular patient. It’s not spreading anywhere near as quickly in general, even in crowded NYC. Why Italy is acting like a tightly-connected population is worth asking.
But also, I think one must take a secondhand Twitter thread with some degree of skepticism.
Personally, ignorant of the recent news with a prior that new diseases come up about every three years and are often over-hyped. It’s worrying, it was just quite sudden.
> Most likely it’s because I remember people getting scared of SARS, Swine Flu, and Bird Flu, and none of those amounted to much of anything.
Honest question: Did SARS ever reach the stage of community transmission in the US?
My recollection is that there was a little bit of community transmission in a few buildings in Toronto (including a hospital) but that otherwise, all North American cases were travelers from Asia.
Wikipedia says:
Local transmission of SARS took place in Toronto, Ottawa, San Francisco, Ulaanbaatar, Manila, Singapore, Taiwan, Hanoi and Hong Kong whereas within China it spread to Guangdong, Jilin, Hebei, Hubei, Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Tianjin, and Inner Mongolia.[citation needed]
I see that [citation needed] tag, but it basically matches with my recollection.
There were no SARS deaths in the US. We had 27 cases, per Wiki.
There are 600+ confirmed Coronavirus cases in the US, with almost 2 dozen deaths. We are about where Italy was 10-11 days ago, and our cases are spreading as quickly, with as much severity. Extrapolate as you wish.
Italy just suspended their top-flight football league, FWIW.
I saw reports earlier that the NBA has told its groups to consider contingencies for playing games in empty arenas. Colleges, even those in relatively remote locations no-where near identified cases, are telling instructors to be ready to move instruction completely on-line.
Sure, buying 10,000 rolls of TP is an over-reaction born of panic. But the rest of this seems quite reasonable to me.
I think a big difference is that SARS2 has a large fraction of people infected with few or no symptoms, whereas with SARS the great majority of people who caught it quickly got very sick. That made quarantines a lot more effective. If half your cases have no symptoms, then screening with a forehead thermometer isn’t going to work so well.
The biggest concern I have w.r.t. SARS2/COVID-19 is that we could overflow the hospitals and medical care system–something that happened in Wuhan, and also now in Northern Italy. A lot of bad cases of pneumonia that are survivable in a well-equipped hospital with proper care are not so survivable if you’re on a cot in the hallway with one exhausted nurse checking on you every few hours, and no chance of better care if your case gets worse because all the ventilators are in use and half hospital staff is too sick to work.
I suspect it would be possible to shut down the spread of this virus, drop R_0 below 1 and cause the thing to fizzle out. But doing so probably requires more decisive decisionmaking and coordination across levels of government than we’re capable of doing. That would be something like shutting down all schools, concerts, conferences, sporting events, etc., for a few weeks.
My prediction is that all those things are actually going to be shut down over the next month or two, but in a non-coordinated way that will not be so effective at stopping the spread of the virus.
What about airports? Those seem like a more significant vector than a random concert.
The US had its first case a month before Italy did though. What broke down so badly in Italy that it has exploded there while continuing to be fairly minor in the US (and other countries)?
Initially, one hospital in Lombardy mistakenly treated a coronavirus patient without taking any unusual(*) precautions against transmission. Which lead fairly rapidly to one hospital in Lombardy treating lots of coronavirus patients without adequate precautions against transmission and with the “staff” and “patient” roles now comingled.
But what we are seeing in the past week or two goes beyond what can plausibly be blamed on that initial failure, I think. Either the coronavirus is spreading faster in Northern Italy than in neighboring countries even after taking that one hospital out of the equation, or Italy is identifying and reporting a much larger fraction of their total coronavirus cases than neighboring countries.
* Or even what other first-world countries might consider usual
Given reports of entire hospitals being converted to holding coronavirus patients and running out of basic equipment, I think that goes beyond testing discrepancies. If you have that many patients in critical condition, it would be noticed, testing or no.
Yeah, whatever’s going on in Italy looks a lot like what happened in Wuhan–so many people getting suddenly very ill that all available medical resources are swamped, every bed in the hospital is full, all respirators are in use, and half the staff is sick with the disease themselves by now thanks to constant exposure, high stress, and insufficient sleep.
This is the nightmare scenario, right? And I don’t see why it can’t happen in the US just as it’s happened in Northern Italy. Taking expensive, maybe-panic-inducing steps to prevent that seems prudent, given how horrible it would be if it happened across a lot of the US.
If the disease follows this pattern in the US, it will probably start in Washington State or that small area in New York State that’s got such a high infection rate. But we’re so interconnected that it’s easy to imagine it happening all across the country, perhaps hitting at slightly different times for each.
Your level of personal concern is almost certainly related to your own personal risk of becoming seriously ill from covid-19 which, if you’re under 40, non-smoker and don’t have any relevant health issues, is pretty low. I’m not concerned for myself either. But people in positions of responsibility have to be concerned for the safety of everyone, including all the over-70s and people with bad health. Logically that means serious preventative measures.
Stick the fence way back from the edge of the cliff if you don’t actually have info about where the crumbly bits are, IYKWIM
I have at times wondered whether it would be a smart idea for a purely self-interested person to get infected with the disease early, so that they have recovered by the time the local medical system gets overwhelmed with cases. (This would be like the original Vaccinia method, where people chose a moment when they had good medical support, to infect themselves and family members with cowpox, so that they wouldn’t get smallpox later.)
However, just a few moments of thought made it clear to me that even from a purely self-interested perspective, this seems like a bad idea. Even with a fairly strong protocol of self-isolation during my own period of illness, it seems implausible to me that I would completely avoid transmitting the infection to anyone else in my community. And if I start a community outbreak earlier, then I increase the likelihood that the spread in my community is faster, so that it has a higher peak. Even if I personally have recovered by that peak, my ability to live life (go to the store, get food, see friends, do social activities) depends on the peak in my community being as low as it can be.
Given all that, I think I should have personal concern about the badness of how this will hit the systems my life depends on, and not just on the direct medical effects on myself and my loved ones.
Also even with the FDA, I would be surprised if we do not get improved treatments in a few months. Even if we quite plausibly get no new drugs or vaccines, it would seem strange if large amounts of experience throughout the world did not find ways of using preexisting antivirals or modifications of standard treatment options to lower the mortality rate.
We might be laughing about all this in a few weeks, but if you’d like to panic a bit more, here goes:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1232922661740613634.html
The people working in fast food / restaurants / retail cannot afford to be sick, so they aren’t. They keep on working and spread the virus everywhere.
I have no idea how bad this really is. What do you think?
Incidentally, people like this also can’t afford for commerce/the economy to shut down for a few months. Not sure what we plan to do about that.
In lefty circles I’m already hearing it taken for granted that we’ll need some kind of government-backed paid sick leave for people infected with COVID19.
How would that help people working for businesses that close down, reduce hours, or reduce staff who now aren’t working (or aren’t working enough) but aren’t actually infected themselves?
‘Dunno, I haven’t yet seen a serious proposal or really researched it too much.
I’ll poke around and see if anyone’s put out a white paper or anything.
I guess my other question is “why would anyone think we could get something like that passed”? Seems like a purely academic excercise.
Well, it’s like robin points out. If we have a system of quarantine but people who need to be in quarantine, especially people in public facing positions, can’t afford to not show up for work, our quarantine efforts will fail.
People will suck it up, go earn their rent money and continue spreading the disease.
I watched “Mad Money” last night and Jim Cramer was calling for all kinds of federal stimulus. Of all varieties including cash tax refunds to low income workers, short-term zero-interest loans to any affected businesses, and massive federal grants to community health systems.
If you ever wanted to argue for paid-sick-leave for food service workers, this incident is the perfect reason why. I can’t see us not getting PSL, for at least some workers, at the end of this.
And also new enforcement mechanisms.
Legitimate question: Is there any kind of solid proposal for how sick leave would work for hourly employees with irregular schedules prepared only days or weeks in advance? Employees primarily paid by tips?
Forgive me for exposing my ignorance here, but don’t hourly employees on irregular schedules still get a certain number of hours per pay period? That should be pretty easy to compute.
As for tips, no clue; payout the minimum wage if their tipped wage falls below it?
Honestly, I gave this item (how to give PSL to hourly or on-demand workers) some thought yesterday and didn’t have an easy solution.
I’m surely not the first person to think about this, though: how do European countries with mandatory PSL handle this? Do they not have hourly workers? Is “country with mandatory PSL” a figment that doesn’t exist?
@Aftagley
Not consistently. Could be 10 or 15 hours one week, 35 hours another week. For cases where they miss a day, obviously they would just use the number of sick time hours to cover that missed shift. If they are missing a week or more, they probably aren’t on the schedule anymore so the question is how do you determine how many hours per week of sick time they can use?
That is likely the only viable option, and strictly speaking it is clearly better than no pay when missing time due to illness, but it may not be enough to prevent significant problems for someone who typically makes much more than minimum wage with tips if they’re going to be out for more than a couple days.
Wait, this is nuts. Forgive me for being trapped in my salaried bubble, but how on earth does anyone function when they can’t plan out how much money they’ll earn?
Kind of repeating my previous question, but what guarantees do workers have in these situations? Is it like a “you will always be paid for at least X hours of work, but some weeks you may be needed for X+Y hours?” or do people literally have no clue how much money they’ll make from week to week?
@Aftagley
Generally if you work for a good restaurant you will get a reasonably consistent number of hours, but there is always going to be some variance (and there is variance in what shifts you get, which greatly impacts how much you bring home in tips). In terms of actual protections…there is nothing other than that if the place you work isn’t giving you enough hours you can get a second job somewhere else to pick up the slack or you can quit and go somewhere else that you hope will give you more hours.
My example (15 one week and 35 the next) was extreme, and probably somewhat unlikely for experienced servers unless they request to not be scheduled certain days for vacation or something, but +/- 8-10 hours from week to week probably isn’t totally out of the ordinary.
In an ideal world, they save money from good weeks to use on down weeks. Probably more commonly, they end up eating a lot of Ramen and driving around with the gas light on for a week or two periodically when hours or tips are low.
There is an Illness Benefit scheme in Ireland; basically, if you’re sick enough not to be able to come in to work, and it’s not “out sick a couple of days”, then you can claim Illness Benefit. You won’t get paid for the first 6 days of sick leave (which could be a problem for people needing that week’s wages) but you get paid thereafter as long as you are certified unfit to work.
I think the priors are doing most of the work there.
>Wait, this is nuts. Forgive me for being trapped in my salaried bubble, but how on earth does anyone function when they can’t plan out how much money they’ll earn?
It’s big issue in current labour rights politics. IDK about other countries, but the British left talk a lot about zero-hours contracts and the gig economy being bad things.
@Edward Scizorhands:
I can tell you how it works in Poland. As a general rule, monthly sick pay/illness benefits are calculated as 80% of the base*, where the base is the average monthly earnings for the 12 month period preceding the illness. For each day of documented sick leave** – whether it is a working day or no – the beneficiary is paid 1/30th of this amount.
Sick pay is paid by the employer for the first 33 days of sick leave during the year. If the employee is absent due to illness for longer than that, illness benefits paid by social insurance take over.
The self-employed (chiefly: small business owners) and people working on the basis of Civil Code contracts***, are entitled to illness benefits calculated in the same manner as above, provided they are current with their voluntary illness insurance.
None of this is fundamentally incompatible with hourly-work, but it might not be compatible with “getting most of your pay in tips” – depending on how it works in practice in the States.
—
* 100% when the absence is due to pregnancy, an accident occurring on the way to or from work, or – interestingly enough – when the absence is due to procedures associated with organ or tissue donation,
** Doctor’s orders of absence, issued on a dedicated, pre-numbered form, are required for both sick pay and illness benefits. We went fully digital with that last year, I think, so the relevant information goes to social insurance directly. Employers, as social insurance payers, may access the relevant documentation through the social insurance portal,
*** There are essentially two flavours of employment here in Poland. “Normal” employment is regulated by the Labour Code. It is also possible to have an employment-like relationship based on the Civil Code. I do not propose to get into the weeds of that here.
Faza (TCM): Thanks, that seems quite straightforward, although I still wonder how they figure out your “base” for hours worked.
If the US had a framework like that, the government would have some switches it could quickly throw in the face of pandemic: loosen the requirements on the second point, and pay a percentage/cap of those first 33 days.
If this goes as badly here as in Italy and Iran, a large fraction of restaurants currently in business will go under.
@Edward Scizorhands:
Working out the base for sick pay/benefits isn’t terribly difficult, given that you declare the base for each month you are subject to social insurance contributions.
For hourly pay, you calculate rate x time worked for the month, add anything else the employee earned on top of that (share of service charge/tips, commissions, etc.), figure out the contributions based on that and submit the declaration to social insurance by the 15th of the following month (or next working day after that, if it falls on a weekend/holiday). The obligation to submit the declarations (and pay the contributions, of course) falls on the payer, which will usually be the employer, unless the beneficiary is self-employed.
There is a new Act to deal with COVID-19, specifically, over here, but the last time I looked through it, it was still going through the legislative process and I believe it was meant to be amended after it passed, because there was something missing. I’ll see if there’s anything addressing these specific points in there.
Aside from that, I suspect that if someone is subjected to quarantine, for example (and I do know that the police will be looking in on those who are to make sure they are keeping quarantine) and they weren’t entitled to illness benefits for whatever reason (e.g. they opted out of voluntary contributions), they may be entitled to some manner of benefits, if they have no income because of this.
When I worked part time at a grocery store my weekly hours were pretty random within a range of 5-25 hours, they cut me back to 6 hours a week for three weeks in a row so I quit.
Edit: Actually I just remembered my stocking job for a clothing store that was even worse. It was a higher end woman’s clothing store so they didn’t want me on the floor, and their internal logistics were bad, I would basically be scheduled day by day and one week I went in for about three hours and was told to leave because they got word that they were not getting any new stock in at all that week, and that shift was all I worked that week.
@albatross11
The disease won’t be as bad here as Italy or Iran. The economic impacts will probably be as bad or worse because of the way we are reacting to it.
acymetric:
Great! How do you know that?
It’s my prediction based on available information. Obviously you might have a different prediction.
My wife is in the unusual position for a high wage worker of being both hourly and having very erratic hours. She works 20 – 50 hours per week and makes very good money on average. But the paycheck she got today was less than half of the one she got two weeks ago. It requires planning to make work, fat weeks go into savings and thin weeks tap from savings. My guess is that this is much harder for both people with weaker impulse control (which sounds bad but this is the place for saying things which are true but sound bad) and for people who make a lower hourly rate. Not to mention that if you are primarily compensated with tips you will have an erratic hourly rate to go with your erratic hours. My guess is that it is pretty hard.
People are trying to solve a difficult problem instead of an easy problem. The difficult problem is to calculate exactly what casual worker will make in the next week. The easy problem is how much money someone needs to live on for week
Incidentally, we really need to get rid of tipping and just raise wages, though that’s easier said than done.
I think your intuition is wildly off here. To see why this is the case consider this very basic question: “How much money does someone need for a week’s rent?” It is in the same class as “How long is a piece of string?”
I have not currently seen data that justifies the level of reaction local to me (Silicon Valley), and one of the first employer-to-employee communications on the topic at my (WFH recommended) employer showed signs of serious clue deficit disorder. (More precisely, someone had confused Covid-19 with the general class of coronavirus, probably with the help of seacrh-and-replace functions in their word processor.)
OTOH, “not currently seen” is not the same as “believe there is none”. And we all know testing has been botched so badly that we haven’t a clue how many people really have it.
My WFH yesterday was at perhaps 75% efficiency, even though I WFH routinely when e.g. mildly ill, or waiting for a delivery. The difference is, (1) that when it’s short term, I choose tasks that are easy to do at home, and postpone those that really need to be local to the servers and (2) even though our networking capacity has been increased because of this, it was badly strained yesterday, leading to unexpected problems. (Our internal Slack system looked likely to collapse under the load, and the VPN was sluggish at peak hours.)
On the good side, my employer has promised to keep paying its hourly workers, such as cafeteria staff. I’m not sure about contract workers, unfortunately, and this does nothing to help e.g. independent restaurants that get substantial business from our lunch crowd. But I’m glad they’ve at least thought of this impact.
Also, I’m over 60 and live with an over 60 who has asthma. I’m happy to reduce our risk of catching it – just worried that we may be in this state of stay-home-to-avoid-infection for months.
Containment chance is basically nil at this point.
Society will survive fine. It’s not even a particularly large danger to younger people.
But my SO and myself were sitting down and working out the odds and if our parents catch it there’s about a 1 in 5 chance we’ll be short a parent at our wedding.
Between the various older relatives it’s north of 50/50 that we’ll have one or more empty chairs.
With respect to schools, one reason I have heard to keep them open is that some families rely on the school lunch program to feed their kids. I wonder how feasible it would be, and if would be worth it, to just leave the cafeterias open for any student who needs it (so just those students and the cafeteria personnel and some monitors, as opposed to the entire student body and teachers and staff) and not have class. Or, failing that, to temporarily give the parents of students who qualify for subsidized/free lunch a cash subsidy, or extra food stamps (I’m guessing that families whose kids get subsidized/free lunch also get food stamps), so they can buy the ingredients for, say, an extra sandwich and piece of fruit a day.
Plus, it is my understanding that kids have a low risk of becoming seriously ill from the coronavirus. Closing schools shouldn’t happen unless the situation is so bad that all public places need to be closed, it makes no sense to close schools and keep places frequented by senior citizens open.
Children are super-vectors. They have extremely poor hygiene so if one gets infected they will all have it in a week, and then give it to their parents.
Yes, plus you get every teacher/principle/janitor/lunch server in the school sick and you are likely to have to close the school in a few weeks anyway, but with less control/notice.
How much of children’s immunity to coronavirus comes down to them having been more effectively quarantined in China? And not taking trips to China? I guess we’re about to find out.
It can have a negative effect on the economy to shut things down. The negative effect on the economy from shutting down grade schools is pretty dubious, particularly in the cases of those schools where kids need the free lunches. You could avoid it by just giving kids vacation now and keeping them later into the summer. If you’re too months in and they still need to be quarantined, just start school back up over the internet. And with that they’ll have more time to prep for it.
How much of children’s immunity to coronavirus comes down to them having been more effectively quarantined in China
This is not it, P(death|infection) is very low for children. The mortality risk seems to rise monotonically with age.
(And it’s not just something about China’s reporting, the pattern holds in Korea and elsewhere.)
The school my kids go to has already sent us an email saying that if the governor declares a state of emergency and closes the schools they intend to continue instruction using the internet. All of the students have school-provided laptops.
This could be the catalyst for a very interesting change in education.
Almost certainly not, though.
@Matt
You probably already know this, but that is pretty atypical for K-12 education nationwide. For most kids, closed school means no school.
I didn’t know that. I suspect the opposite is true. That is, probably in 2020 more than half of all K-12 students have school-provide laptops or tablets.
@acymetric
There are text books. Obviously not everyone learns best from a text alone, but it is something for upper grades.
@Matt
Well, I stand corrected there, although it looks like you probably still have between 30 and 40% of students without access (and the places that don’t provide laptops/tablets to students seem likely to be the places where students are least likely to have their own via their parents).
@Randy M
Sure, but how are they submitting assignments (or getting assignments)?
Teachers should be able to prepare emergency take home lessen plans for two weeks. Not “keep kids busy for eight hours” lesson plans, but “make sure kids are getting acquainted with the essential material” lesson plans.
Submitting assignments and giving feedback is nice, but non-essential for emergency times.
A lot of in-school time is non-instructional.
Ah, here is the disconnect. We have very different ideas in mind of what kind of timeframe we’re looking at is. I’m expecting schools to end up being closed for the remainder of the academic year in many cases.
Is that what is happening, or what you think will need to?
In that case I’d say that you just end the school year a quarter short and restart it in July, though of course that’s a huge disruption to a huge number of people. Still, the alternative is to either pass everyone ahead half a grade assuming they are being homeschooled adequately or hold them back a year.
@Randy M
It is what I expect to happen* (and I think the groundwork is already being laid, not all of the current closings have given definite or even approximate resume dates and the ones that have I expect will have the closures extended). I’m also not even confident everyone will be ok with opening back up in July. I guess we’ll see where the panic level is by then.
*Not what I think should happen, but unfortunately I’m not in charge here and my views seem to be a fringe minority opinion.
Even if kids have a low risk of serious incidence their teachers don’t, so open the schools for a few weeks and then close them again when you run out of subs.
The point of closing schools is to stop a lot of transmission of the virus. The kids are mostly not at risk, but their parents and grandparents and surrounding community are.
Poor parents manage to last three months without free lunch in the summer.
I’m sure you’d be hearing about the “stigma of poverty,” this wouldn’t signal well.
@Alexander Turok says:
I don’t know if they’re nationwide, but Berkeley, and Oakland, California have summer luncharacter programs.
FWIW, so does NYC.
So does my medium-sized southern town. I think these programs are common everywhere.
St Louis too.
Stigma of poverty is bad. Lack of childcare and lack of food for your kids is worse.
Kids don’t really get very sick from coronavirus. There seems to be some evidence this is paired with reduced contagiousness, but we don’t really know yet.
Also kids being home in many cases will mean that grandparents or other elderly end up doing childcare duty, which seriously jeopardizes them.
So it’s not a complete no-brainer to close schools. I don’t know what the right call is and I’m very glad it’s not my decision to make.
Closing the schools is more problematic than it seems at first glance, though widely practiced. Problems:
1. Kids seem less susceptible to the disease than adults. (It may be they are asymptomatic carriers, though.)
2. If the schools are closed, the kids have to go somewhere.
3. If they are at home they need a caregiver.
4. Parents who have to take time off work to care for children at home are not always going to be paid for that time off. In the US, a large fraction of workers don’t have large amounts of sick time or PTO to use.
5. There have been reports of parents just dropping kids off at a local mall and then going to work (urban legend? possibly).
6. If there is a caregiver at home, that person is more likely to get the disease from an infected kid.
7. Caregivers may be grandparents or other older adults, and they are more in danger from the disease than children.
8. Maybe older kids can be left alone, and then the caregiver goes to work while still in the asymptomatic stage (first five days, we are now hearing), and spreads the disease at work.
The point of the above is not to say “don’t close the schools,” but that the trade-offs are not as clear as one might think.
A lot of schools have been closed in my area, and universities, too. (Or colleges/universities switching to online classes.)
This is why you close schools BEFORE all the kids are infected.
How long is that expected to be required? Seems to me it would need to be for some months.
As best I can tell, people are advocating that we shut the country down for 2020 and maybe we can give it another try in early 2021.
I dunno.
Economically damaging quarantines are bad and should be avoided, for sure.
But it seems to me that the Italy model of “wait until the virus is rampant in the community, then institute draconian quarantine measures” is probably something like the worst case scenario.
If you’re willing to take the economic hit of a quarantine, the time to do it is before widespread infection in your local community. Once the widespread infection is already there, increased economic disruption isn’t doing you any additional good. At that point you might as well just have everyone keep going to work, tell them to wash their hands, and hope for the best, right?
@Matt M
I agree with all of that, but with the additional note that it is probably possible to limit the spread of the disease better than Italy did without the level of economic disruption that is being casually proposed (or is already taking place) here in the US.
I don’t want us to take no action, I just want us to take intelligent, reasonable, effective action but that isn’t what is happening now (to my eye).
Really? How? I believe the opposite is true.
The US is one of the most individualistic societies on Earth. We are very reluctant to voluntarily surrender our own freedom of movement. Already there’s a cute little series of stories from St. Louis of an affluent suburban family, recently returned from an Italian vacation, who is supposed to be under quarantine. Some local journalists have gotten quite a bit of mileage out of stories where they follow these people around as they continue to go grocery shopping, go see a movie at the theater, get their nails done, etc.
And how are you going to stop them? Short of some pretty severe legal threats or armed guards outside their house in a manner that almost assuredly violates the spirit of the constitution, and our basic core principles about what American liberty means? And even if you are ready, willing, and able, to post those armed guards, how long can you do that? How many families can you guard at once?
I appreciate that in South Korea, the government can decree “everyone stay home now for the good of society, if you break this pronouncement you are shameful and dishonorable” and most people will assent.
That’s simply not going to happen here. The best option is probably for the government to lean on large businesses and guilt/shame/threaten them into closing. Eliminate the desire to break quarantine by taking away all the destinations such people might go. But the local individual small businesses will almost assuredly still try to violate this, and what do you do about the people who insist they have no food, etc.?
I see no reason to forecast that America is better equipped to handle this than anywhere else, and plenty of reason to suspect it might be much worse.
And how are you going to stop them? Short of some pretty severe legal threats or armed guards outside their house in a manner that almost assuredly violates the spirit of the constitution, and our basic core principles about what American liberty means? And even if you are ready, willing, and able, to post those armed guards, how long can you do that? How many families can you guard at once?
Social shaming. In the case you mention, if the local news media post big photos of Suburban Plaguebearer and kids, and make big splashy headlines about “These people could be infecting YOU” , then neighbours, local businesses and random people on the street are going to shun them, refuse to do business with them, and browbeat them into staying home under quarantine. And if anyone does get sick from being in contact with these people, there is always the recourse of going to law to sue them for public endangerment or the like.
If everyone is literally crossing the street to avoid them, if the nail salon manager asks them to leave because the other customers are demanding “them or us”, if nobody will associate with them, the possibly infected may be as independent as they like free of the government, but boycotting by the people who live around them is a different matter. Angry mobs may not be pretty, but in the ultimate extreme they do work.
Yes, yes, I understand that this is supposed to be the answer. My only point is that Americans seem to be the least susceptible to this of basically anyone on Earth.
So if there’s a high negative correlation between “severity of epidemic” and “population’s willingness to sacrifice individual benefits for the common good either altruistically or due to fear of social shaming,” then I would expect the US to be the worst hit of all countries.
Well, maybe. But this only works for the first walking infection vector. What about when it’s, say, 20 people? I can’t keep a mental list of 20 strangers I’m supposed to be shaming all day.
What about willingness to seek individual benefits whether or not they also serve the common good? I think you are dramatically underestimating the willingness of the American people to make sacrifices; we meet pretty much our entire demand for blood transfusions by voluntary donation, for example. But in this particular case, most of the behavior we need to prevent the transmission of coronaviruses matches the behavior individuals would rationally perform to selfishly avoid being themselves infected by their unhygenic neighbors. Or, at the institutional level, avoid being blamed shamed and sued for getting people infected at the e.g. music festival they didn’t cancel. And we’re seeing just that behavior, individually and institutionally.
Keep in mind, we don’t need 100% suppression of every deviant disease-spreading behavior. If the collective behavior of Americans (or Europeans) in general reduces the spread of the virus by a factor of two or so, R0 drops below 1.0 and the pandemic stalls and dies.
I think teachers skew pretty old as well though, if we are worried about old people having to spend time around children(I think we all are) I am not sure sending them to school does much to resolve that one.
This was the opposite of my instinct, which is that teachers tend to be younger out of college sorts, so I looked it up.
http://neatoday.org/2018/06/08/who-is-the-average-u-s-teacher/
The “average teacher” is a 42 year old white woman, so not exactly skewing old (that’s a bit younger than the workforce on average).
Anecdotes gonna anecdote, it might be that everywhere else I ever worked actually skewed young, when I did volunteer work for my local isd the elementary schools seemed to be full of boomers.
I am designing a homebrew system for tabletop roleplaying, and I’ve come to the question of dice rolls. Suppose we have some number representing a character’s skill, some other number representing a challenge’s difficulty, and a desire to inject some randomness into the process of comparing those two numbers: what sort of dice rolls should I use? I assume that someone somewhere has thought deeply about all the ins and outs of 1d20 vs 3d6 and every other way of randomizing outcomes, so I turn to my favorite group of nerds: what are your preferred dice rolling mechanics? What should such a system be aiming for?
A few conversation starters:
How important is it for players to be able to look at numbers and easily do the mental math of “I have +4 vs a difficulty 15 so I’m about 50% to succeed”?
I can look at a comparison like “Roll skill plus 1d20 vs Roll skill plus 3d6” and note that the systems work basically the same except that 3d6 is closer to a normal distribution, but I don’t have an inuitive feel for what that means when playing with those systems. What should I be thinking about when looking at distributions?
My brief experience with designing a RPG system is that setting the odd of winning a given roll skill is less important in the design than properly limiting black swan events. In other words, 1d20 is bad because the high variance means that some players will annoyingly (from a subjective play perspective) often miss “easy” rolls. A low variance roll like 3d6 is much better because theorically even if the odds are similar, from a subjective enjoyment perspective, it produces much less annoying faillures of easy actions.
Unless you aim specifically for a game with wild swings in the turn of events, if the system is mostly meant to be a support that disappears behind storytelling, dice rolls should be as little critical as possible, meaning that the determining factors in succeeding in an action should be skill level and difficulty of the action, with dice adding only a small bit of noise.
I remember a system that went even further in reducing the variant by having the base roll be something like 3d6 with special dice which each had one + face, one – face, and all the other faces blank, so that the results varied between +++ and —, but with a very strong dominance of 0.
4e solves the high variance problem with huge modifiers, 5e intentionally brought it back. Also, your DM is not helping if they are calling for checks on things that are ‘easy’ in general DMs call for too many checks/the same check over and over again insuring that the player will eventually fail/succeeded. Additionally, you shouldn’t have blackswans in the other direction, a crit on a skill check isn’t magic, crits in combat are very simple, you hit(like you probably do most of the time) and you do a bit more damage, the pervasive skill crit mania where people do impossible things or are considered literally invisible from a stealth crit is probably worse than calling for a check when there should not be a check IMO.
There are lots of situations where you can not meaningfully hide, or otherwise use a skill to change the outcome, there is not a 5% chance of magically doing literally anything you are trying to do, or at least, there should not be /rant. (I like my tabletop games to do genre emulation, and prefer the harder genres)
Of course given how consistently people do these things, a dice pool system is probably superior for meeting my preferences, although I don’t think it should be necessary.
I emphatically agree with this. This goes back to the development of 3rd Edition, circa 2000. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was losing market share (mostly to World of Darkness), and the owners were like “What’s wrong with AD&D?” The answer, they decided, was that all their competitors had the same resolution roll for every task, while D&D had always had 1D20 roll-over, percentile skill checks, 1D6 and bell-curve-D6 rolls to resolve different tasks.
The D20 was used for attack rolls and saving throws, and Gary Gygax’s design principle for these situations was “there’s always a chance”: no matter how low or high level it should always be possible to actually hit an enemy, survive or die from a serial cliffhanger scenario, etc. That logic doesn’t transfer to “There’s a skill called Persuasion, so I’ll roll to persuade the King to abdicate in favor of me.”
NATURAL TWENTIES DON’T WORK ON SKILL CHECKS! That’s just something the internet made up because they stopped reading the rulebook halfway through and assumed the thing about attack rolls worked the same for all dice. You can’t make yourself king with a good diplomacy roll unless you already have +40 to it.
… and the DM decides to allow a roll for it. Not every conceivable action needs to be allowed. You can’t fly even with athletics +100.
The skill check to balance on Clouds is 120
Because of course it is.
No, but seriously, you have a point. Different games have different conventions, and it sounds like that version of D&D you quote is perfectly fine with players who get skills absurdly high being basically myth made flesh. Presumably such target numbers aren’t actually achievable simply by getting a whole town to stand around and aid your result?
Uh, last time I checked, every version of D&D is perfectly fine with players who get skills that involve shooting fireballs out of their hands or whatever. And that happens at low levels. As a matter of course. Even if you don’t roll a 20.
I mean, sure, it’s unrealistic that someone with a high speech skill can persuade the king to abdicate his throne. On the other hand, you are playing a fantasy game. Unrealism is the whole point.
The jumplomancer is a good example
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?444052-The-Jumplomancer-are-you-serious
Fighter 1 / Druid 9 / Exemplar 5
At Exemplar 1, we choose Skill Artistry in Jump.
I’ve also seem some absurd builds for fairly low level characters all built around maxing out one stat or skill to a stupid degree to allow you to reach those high checks.
But can you leap tall buildings in a single bound? Because that leads to flying, every time. (caveat: N=1)
Good example of something, alright.
You can probably manage to rip the tendons from your legs or something.
Yeah. The way the simple, unified resolution roll is explained to new players always seems to lead to this misunderstanding. To quote my first search result from Twitter:
The more complicated version in the rule book is there are two and only two types of random resolution where a 20 always succeeds and a 1 always fails.
Funny you should mention that example, as it ties in a 40 year-old debate over whether fantasy RPG characters should be allowed to grow into superheroes or not. Some people find it confusing and frustrating that a human could ever grow into a superhero rather than having an origin story that justifies being a superhero from the word go.
The oldest famous example I know of is Steve “Realism Sexually Arouses Me” Jackson, whose first RPG, The Fantasy Trip (1980), had you level up by choosing to raise your Strength, Dexterity or IQ upon accumulating enough XP, which he found imperfect for long-term campaigns because it meant long-running characters would grow from stats somewhere on the normal human bell curve to – GASP – unrealistic ones! This was part of his motivation for making GURPS.
The power of a superhero doesn’t have to be static either. Superman himself leveled up many times between 1938 and October 1946, from “fast as an express train” to “FTL flight” and from “a bursting shell can penetrate his skin” to “withstands atomic bombs.”
This is an argument that people make all the time in fantasy settings and it’s awful. “In a world of magical superheroes why are you complaining that Batman survived a hundred foot fall onto concrete?” Because every fantastical setting is like reality unless noted, and I think Batman’s bones are still made of calcium, not adamantium. There are fireball-throwing wizards, the book was pretty clear about that, but human beings seem to still be ordinary human beings which means their leg bones can shatter when falling and their minds can notice that abdicating the throne is a dumb idea.
What you are advocating for is not a world of unrealism, it’s a world with no rules, where literally anything could happen at any moment. Maybe that peasant will shoot you with his laser eyes! I mean why wouldn’t peasants have laser eyes, we’re not trying to be realistic are we?
If we want to talk about realism then… a charismatic individual convincing people to join them and turning them into fanatics willing to hand over all their worldly goods or be willing for die for their cause …. the overpowered nature of high diplomacy/charisma in D&D type games may be one of the most realistic/plausible parts.
Because kings have been talked into handing over thrones.
People have been converted to follow new leaders or to leave their families for a charismatic figure on remarkably short notice.
But GM’s hate it because they rarely include ready-made plotlines for what to do if the antagonist is talked over to the heroes side.
Also it tends to make for a worse story than one where the guy who can throw fireballs out of his hands learns how to edit the fabric of reality arbitrarily.
Batman surviving a 100 foot fall without shattering many of his bones is way less realistic than the super charismatic guy convincing the village full of antagonists to abandon their cult and instead worship him because he pulled off a some stage-magician level tricks.
Not really. Because the original complaint here was that the rules of D&D allowed for characters with high speech to perform remarkable feats with said speech skills.
Arbitrarily saying “thats bad because it’s unrealistic” (even though, as Murphy points out, it is a thing that has actually happened in real life) while ignoring the fact that every level 1 newbie wizard can shoot fireballs (i.e. use intelligence to perform remarkable feats) is just weird to me.
The stated rules of the universe allow for both crazy speech feats and crazy intelligence/magic feats.
To clarify at least my intent here, it was not that you can never achieve something impressive with a persuasion check, rather that there are situations where, their disposition, the facts they are aware of at the time, etc, prevent them from being amenable to your persuasion. I am saying, you are not a boxed AI, you can’t convince the guard to just let you out of the box with nothing but honeyed(or deeply threatening) words. If there is a reasonable framework by which you could achieve your goal, probably over iterative interaction, then that is a path I am willing to go down with my players.
If someone complained to you that D&D lets you survive hundred foot falls and that’s stupid, would you come back with the same “but wizards can shoot fireballs, this is just a world where things work that way!” excuse? Because you can in fact do that in D&D. Once you get to about tenth level you can fall for miles without dying, the rules are dumb. Almost no one takes this to indicate that the Player’s Handbook is attempting to depict a world in which gravity works fundamentally differently: we all recognize that the rules are an imperfect abstraction and D&D is no more supposed to be a world of bizarre gravity than it supposed to be a world where you can use grappling to launch someone down a lineup of people at relativistic speeds.
D&D gives every indication that it is supposed to be a world where people with the right mental muscles can shoot fire from their hands, it describes this as a fundamental part of the setting in dozens of different places. Nowhere does the book make it seem like this is a world where natural ones and twenties mean you can fly by body-slamming the ground twenty times until you miss.
Our ability to determine which things the rules obviously didn’t mean to enable, and shouldn’t be used to enable, has something to do with realism.
Note that in 5e, a natural 1 or natural 20 on a check does not guarantee success or failure. You just add the roll to the modifier, and if you beat the DC then you get the good outcome. Crits and fumbles are only for attack rolls.
A lot of people houserule it back in because they like the stories it makes when someone succeeds/fails at a key moment despite normally being able to do it quite well, but it’s not a natural part of the game.
“High modifier, low roll” moments still happen, but it feels a little more natural because it’s at least bound up with the DC, and it’s not too hard to get to a point where your modifier can still make checks despite your bad roll.
I agree that it’s an important part of the DM’s job to figure out when a roll is appropriate though. Some things you should be able to do consistently, some things you should never be able to do no matter how lucky you get.
In general, if a 1 isn’t a failure and a 20 isn’t a success, the GM shouldn’t ask for the roll in the first place. When the player asks if they can climb the smooth glass wall, the GM should say no, and when they ask if their PC can jump over a puddle, the GM should not require a roll either.
i kind of disagree:
Let’s use your climbing a smooth glass wall example (and excluding any outside preparation such as spells or equipment that could let them climb it) I still think it’s valuable to let them roll, just to see how much of a failure it is. Maybe on a 20, they manage to get up a few feet before sliding down while on a 1, they crack the wall, or fall for a trivial amount of damage or whatever.
I agree with you on not rolling to accomplish trivial tasks, however.
In general, I’d say that’s a bad DM move. Unless the PCs have no skill and thus are very bad at estimating task difficulty, they should be aware that they are attempting an impossible task.
If you tell them the target is literally higher than they can roll, and nat 20’s won’t even get them there, and they still say “Well I’m playing an idiot, so I’ll try it anyway,” fine, I guess, let them roll and piss off the others. Otherwise it just seems like a failure to properly communicate to the player what their character would know about the situation.
I think Angry GM’s rules on this are reasonable–only roll if there is a chance for failure, a chance for success, and failure matters (such as time constraints, damage, noise, whatever).
Hmm, I don’t know if I understand you.
Here is how this would come up in my game:
Me: “in front of you is a smooth glass wall, given it’s immense clarity it’s difficult to discern how far up it extends. Through the wall you can see the garden of the aquamarine wizard.”
Player: “I try to climb the wall.”
I don’t think that at this point I’ve failed to properly communicate the situation to the player, they’ve just got a bias for action and didn’t take the time to examine the wall carefully, find out how slick it was or how high it extended.
My option here is either follow the rule that has all major actions taken be influenced by a skill roll or set up a separate system where players can only attempt a skill roll if the DM thinks they could/should succeed.
Also, they may not be able to succeed in their chosen action, but I can always work in some way to make a 20 feel nice – maybe they execute the wall-run perfectly, achieve massive height and establish that it goes up really, really high. This lets them now know they can’t go over it and need to look for another solution. Maybe while climbing, the player notice something on the other side of the wall, etc…
This may just be my style, but the more skill rolls my player makes, the more hooks I feel like I have to play with/feed them information.
I agree with your examples, but I think it’s important to distinguish “you can’t do that because it wouldn’t be possible no matter how good you were” and “you can’t do that because you’re not good enough at the skill”.
Calling for a roll even when they have the modifier to make it on a 1 or don’t have the modifier to make it on a 20, helps connect their investment in specific skills to their success/failure. In the case of a roll that won’t be good enough even on a 20, it helps make it clear that this is a thing that could possibly be done, versus being impossible or bumping up against the limits of the DM’s world.
This is most visible with knowledge stuff like Investigation in 5e, where if you aren’t calling for rolls it’s not always going to be clear whether the DM would have just told you this stuff automatically, or if you’re getting extra stuff specifically because you invested in Investigation.
I’m sure you don’t, however consider the inferential distance that may be here. Their skills are listed in abstract terms or at best related to actual context through an ill-remembered chart somewhere. On the other hand, they may be picturing a glass wall with occasional wood frames or purchase, or cracks here and there, something. Your words, however precise, won’t map exactly the same to actual difficulty in your mind and theirs. And maybe they have prior experience with games where any situation they encounter is surmountable with a lucky roll. What about just saying straight up, “Anyone with any climbing experience would know this is an impossible task.” Which, not to get bogged down in details, they’d probably notice upon touching it and before they got high enough to do anything harmful. (Of course it doesn’t help that a lot of games do in fact give target numbers for “impossible”, right?)
As to that bias towards action, I suspect you don’t want to curb that with gotchas. Better to be eager to face challenges and try stuff than paralyzed by caution.
Yes, that. Do that. You are there to be the bastion of common sense between the rules and the PCs (or vice versa). Of course, try to align your sensibilities with the tone and setting presented in the rules, etc, blah blah blah.
If they can’t succeed and insist on trying, tell them, without calling for dice, “You try to climb but immediately fall on your ass.” Then, if you think there is now a situation where they can attempt (and possibly succeed!) to mitigate the harm from the futile gesture, maybe “Make a climbing/acrobatics/whatever check to avoid taking falling damage.”
(all IMO, of course)
edit:
@moonfirestorm
I like all you said there.
It would seem to me that you have failed to convince them of even the approximate degree of realism to be expected in the campaign, which is more important to get right than the details of a wall. But the miscommunication over the wall is at least an indicator of the broader meta-failure, and an example you can use to tactfully re-orient the characters expectations in that regard. Letting them roll the dice would be a false signal supporting their initial misunderstanding, and so ensuring more of the same to come.
Tangentially related, I once had to roll something like 80 dice for some garbage in Mage, only to have the DM reveal that it was impossible for me to actually succeed on the check, the rest of the party was amused by my ire so maybe it works out from a utilitarian perspective, but I did not enjoy it.
There’s an obscure rule in the 3.5 DMG which I actually quite like that suggests treating a 20 as a 30 and a 1 and a -10 for skill rolls. This strikes me as a good balance. Crits aren’t magic that let an untrained archer hit a fly at 300 yards (or a normal PC climb the glass wall under discussion), but they do provide a substantial edge over what you could normally do. Likewise, a 1 isn’t always a failure.
I’m 90% convinced y’all are correct – it’s definitely important to let your players know when they’ve run up against the limits of possibility and not give them false hope. Die rolls can give them this hope, so you need to be careful when calling for a roll.
Here’s my final nugget of uncertainty: in my understanding of D&D and the related RPGs, players interact with the world by describing their intended action and then rolling a die to see how close they come to their description. The higher the number, the closer their description matches reality.
As long as I’m having my characters describe actions they’re attempting (IE, I run at the wall and use my momentum to carry me up) instead of results they want (IE, I use dex and climb over the wall) I really don’t like the idea of taking the roll away from them. It kind of feels like I’m limiting their ability to attempt the action more than I’m successfully propping up the limits of my world.
In retrospect, this probably has resulted in me not including very many literally-impossible-to-overcome obstacles in my campaigns. I’ll need to rethink my approach to this.
I think we’re dealing with edge cases in general here. It’s possible nobody in your group thinks to try something stupid, though I’d put “use my momentum to carry me up the glass wall” in that category–such a feat requires a certain amount of traction, after all.
Picture, for example, that your player comes up to the castle gates and instead of announcing themselves, or climbing, or whatever, tries to push the wall down. Do you let him roll for that? If so, you probably have something in mind like, “Well, on a 20 it’s a very poorly maintained portion of the wall, with considerable weather damage and possibly some gopher holes underneath.”
The dice in this case is a stand in for not all the aspects of the world not previously specified. I wouldn’t say that’s an invalid philosophy. But it’s also reasonable to say, “This just isn’t something a person can do–that’s the point of wall. Since this is a busy city with numerous guards who would have reported any wear and tear given the threat of invasion, you can push all you like and roll any dice you want, you won’t push it down.”
As for describing actions, I think you should solicit both the intent and the approach. That way you can let them know if the approach is feasible and clear up misconceptions, with a reasonable bias towards allowing their zany schemes a chance.
For example, if a player says “I’m going to try to convince the guard we’re foreign dignitaries,” maybe you give them a high target number and let them try to see where they are going with it. If they add “so he lets us into the castle,” you can tell them, “actually, it’s open to the public now, you can just go in” if that’s the case since you realize his plan was predicated on misinformation. (Bad example, though, because of course we’d let them put on their stupid accent, have the guard ridicule it, then tell them it’s open to visitors).
They present the same approximate range for setting target numbers, but work quite differently with the how likely you are to hit any given number. And thus, if you give a +1 bonus in a 1d20 system, it makes 5% difference, always, but it is different in a 3d6 system because the players rolls are concentrated in the center of the curve.
A flat probability of a single roll is more intuitive, but on the other had we are usually pretty well acquainted with normal distribution, so players should be able to grok either well enough.
There’s also fudge dice, dice with -1,0, and +1 on them (2 faces of a d6 each), where your expected value will be whatever your skill is, with a range of how many dice you roll. Sometimes I play around with the 0,1,2 dice from betrayal at the house on the hill, which is mathematically the same, though in this case your expected value will be the number of dice you roll, with a range of twice +/- that. Kind of neat, and if you were rolling your skill, say, you’d always have a chance of failure, and instantly know if you had odds in your favor or not (skill>target?) but the actual odds are hard to calculate on the fly.
I went with a hybrid system for my home-grown system; the number of faces go up with skill, as does a flat bonus.
I add +1 for every two extra faces. So if you start with 1d4, 1d6 level of skill gets a +1; 1d8 gets a +2; 1d10 gets a +3; 1d12 gets a +4; and 1d20 gets a +5. It goes higher but I forget the rules there.
Rolling a “crit” on any die (the max number) gives a 50% bonus to the number on the die for skill checks, or invokes critical mechanics in combat. Roll a 1 and something (appropriately) bad happens.
So a 1d4 has a range of Critical Failure, 2, 3, and 6, for an average of 3. 1d6 has Critical Failure, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9, for an average of a little over 4. And so on and so forth.
1 is always a critical failure, so as you get higher skills, the odds of a critical failure decrease; the odds of critical success also decrease, so there is some advantage to a rogue class to having lower attack die, as I have a lot of things tying into critical attacks.
The overall system produces, perhaps counterintuitively, less variance the higher your skill gets; in particular, you get fewer and fewer critical successes, or critical failures, even though nominally there should be greater variance.
But I also don’t routinely throw challenges that require a 15 at my players. If a character is good at something, this should be their chance to shine, or to get access to some kind of extra treasure, or otherwise benefit them; if the skills they have just become the prerequisite to completing the next challenge, what was the point in having the skill?
So the most common challenge in the system requires a roll of 2-4. 5-8 is a little less common, 9-12 is pretty infrequent, and anything higher is rare.
You could let the player invest his character creation points into a description of how he wishes to shape the probability distribution of how successful he is in different situations. Driver’s License might ordinarily gurantee success at driving, Mad Science might let you pump character points into increasing your potential without really reducing fumble chance. During the game, the GM would eyeball the character’s chances of success at any particular action based on how he understands the freeform text that the player wrote to define the character. The downside is that the player might be bad at predicting the eyeballs, and feel cheated. In this system, a d20 would be as good as any other combination of dice, so long as the DM understands the distributions involved.
Similarly, a Wizard who prepares spells in the morning might write down (in secret?) a freeform description of what each spell does, and then (or as he tries to cast it?) the GM bases the mana cost/casting difficulty on how generally useful it is – or perhaps how useful his companions would expect it to be, had the Wizard told them of it at preparation time.
I’ve been messing around with Traveller and Stars Without Number lately and I like the probability curve on 2d6 a lot – much more predictable results than the randomness of a 1d20, and a bonus or penalty of 1 or 2 matters a lot.
SWN does something interesting where it uses 2d6 for skills and 1d20 for combat, which is partly because it’s a weird hybrid of Traveller and D&D but I kind of like it because it makes combat much more chaotic and unpredictable than the rest of the system, which is interesting.
Why ? I get it, it can be fun to design a two-wheeled muscle-powered personal vehicle, but bicycles do already exist.
In terms of setting toolkits, I think that Fate is the most flexible; you can take a look at Mindjammer to see how this seemingly simple toolkit can be used to create a work of art.
If you’re looking for something with a lot more crunch out of the box, you can use the White Wolf system, or possibly even GURPS, if you’ve got enough time. I would recommend against using D20, however, since it’s pretty specific to D&D.
The advantage of using a premade system (even a simple one like Fate) is that someone had already done the hard work for you. They’d balanced all the features to the best of their ability, figured out all the statistical probabilities, and playtested the game to make sure there are no obvious exploits. You can certainly do all that stuff on your own, but again, why ?
+1 to this.
A lot of RPG systems that have been created over the years. Looking for one that fits the sort of game you want to play sounds a lot more fruitful than trying to build a new one. At the very least, this will keep you from painstakingly reinventing the wheel.
As long as you can find (other) players. That’s the hard part.
Yes, I’d bet that a lot of the better-known non-D&D RPGs are just as hard to find players for as convincing them to play your home-brew system.
Seems like an adequate enough reason to do it, right?
Not if you expect anyone but yourself to play it…
Because I know exactly how fast I want to go, how high I like the seat, and no one’s building bicycles to my exact specs.
Even then, it’s probably a better idea to take an existing design and modify it rather than re-invent everything from first principles.
Speaking as both a collector and designer of RPG systems, there are a lot of reasons to make your own.
Systems encode a lot of setting and genre information into their mechanics. For example, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, Fantasy Flight games designed a custom set of luck dice (they don’t label them as such, but that’s what they are) and built a system where you roll them for everything. This created a system where it felt like your characters were always relying on luck; great if you want to play Han Solo, terrible if you want to play Qui-Gon Jin. In contrast, the West End Games Star Wars system used moderately sized pools of d6s, with force abilities stacking more dice on top. This had exactly the opposite effect: very high consistency made a great game for playing Jedi, but if you weren’t a force-user the system tended to offer you a choice between ultra-specialization and consistent failure. Both systems have great things about them, but are suited for very different games.
A lot of games out there cluster around the same handful of play patterns. Fate, PbtA, and OSR games all fall into this category. If your group wants a lightweight, flexible system that encourages resource hoarding, hand-waves away most interesting differences, stalls completely in one-on-one duels and puts a huge amount of pressure on the GM, then Fate is a great choice for you. If not, then it isn’t, and it really doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at Fate Core, The Dresden Files, Tian Xia, Secret Life of Cats, Mindjammer, or Camelot Trigger – they’re all going to make the same trade-offs.
Game publishers also tend to have blind spots and cut corners (and playtesting is always the first corner cut). I tried to run the third edition of White Wolf’s Mage: The Ascension (still one of my favorite games) once. My players kept getting confused in combat, and I didn’t figure out why until I tried to read through the relevant chapter in the rule-book, only to discover that half the chapter was missing (the initiative rules from other White Wolf systems were gone and nothing was in their place, may abilities referenced sections that weren’t in the book at all, etc.). Failures that egregious are moderately rare now, but assuming that a system will be balanced for your group out-of-the-box is setting yourself up for disappointment.
There are also a lot of niches that commercial systems haven’t successfully occupied yet. I’ve explored hundreds of systems, but I haven’t yet found one that does sword dueling well for an immersive player (Imagine is the closest, but pays a heavy price for that strength in other areas). I also haven’t found a good estate-management system for games that focus on the players being in charge of political holdings (Houses of the Blooded has a lot of potential, but quickly throws more resources than they could ever use at even half-way competent players). There are only four diceless systems I’ve encountered, three of them are quite specialized and the fourth doesn’t seem to do much well.
My group has produced four full systems and a bunch of hacks on others. Even playing with systems in alpha states (never been playtested before, chunks of rules still not written down), the homebrew games have been more successful on average than the games we’ve played with published systems (and much more successful than the games we’ve played with the most popular published systems).
Have you checked out The Riddle of Steel? It was written by Jacob Northwoods, President of the HEMA Alliance, and it’s intended to model realistic melee duels, which it does really well. It has however had consistent publishing problems, so there’s an official successor called Blade of the Iron Throne, and an unofficial one called Song of Swords.
I have a personal soft spot for SoS since it was made by some of the folks over at 4chan’s /tg/ boards, which has long been one of my internet haunts. There’s actually an interesting story behind it too! Basically a guy was running Riddle of Steel duels on /tg/, and like anyone who has run a system for a long time he started to feel that he could improve it with some tinkering. So a lot of tinkering later he got together with some other guys, they made their own game studio, got a kickstarter going, and after an eternity of screwing around, finally published the game like a year ago. Here’s a quick example of play, you should check it out!
I believe it’s better design to put more information on the character sheet rather than hidden from the player. Dungeons & Dragons gets this wrong with the entire concept of Difficulty Class. DC is the equivalent of AC (Armor Class) for every task resolution except hitting people with weapons, but AC is a line on yours and the monster stats, while DC is opaque information that has to be made up on a case-by-case basis, becoming the majority of the DM’s on-the-spot workload (as opposed to pre-game setting and plot crafting).
One thing you can do with a normal distribution is have every dice resolution be roll under a number on your own character sheet and make the character roll more dice if the task is harder. Say normal resolution is 2D6: if an environment is harder to hide in, it requires rolling 3D6 (or more) under the relevant number on their character sheet instead.
Well I like this idea a lot, but how would you recommend resolving contested rolls or hidden information? For example, I don’t want the rogue to know if they succeeded or not on their decent stealth check/deception check etc.
@Spookykou:
Then I would say always treat stealth and deception as contested rolls and roll for the NPC behind a screen. As to contested rolls in general,
@Ninety-Three:
Yeah, I’m assuming easy/medium/hard versions of any given skill check. That’s a relatively wide design space. 2D6 means that if a character trained in a skill = 11, they succeed at basic tasks 97.2% of the time and if they want to get amazing at it they have to raise it 9 times (to 20) to succeed on hard versions 97.3% of the time.
That sounds like you’re either going to compress all tasks into easy/medium/hard, or you’re going to make a system with enough resolution that it reinvents the arbitrary fudge factor of assigning a specific difficulty to a task.
The best system I encountered was this:
The player had 2 attributes:
1) Talent
2) Skill
Talent – A simple modifier.
Skill – the number of dies (d6) to throw.
Result of die throw – Max(all dies) +1 for every 6 past the first one, + talent.
You compare that vs the difficulty.
Example:
Skil 3, talent 2
throw 3 dies, result is 3,6,6 -> final result is 6 (max die) +1 (for the extra 6) +2 (talent) for a total of 9.
Pretty good!
So players with low skill get high variance, and players with high skill get low variance, with some upside.
Terrible mistakes can still happen (all ones) or terrific results (all 6), but are pretty rare.
The base talent has a huge impact.
I don’t think it needs to matters that much. Depends on how much of the fun/game will be the strategizing of combat and how much of it is “roleplay”.
There’s been a number of that use poker hands as the basis for skill checks.
Most people are not precisely aware of the odds of poker hands, just the ordering and a intuitive guess of how “lucky” they were.
I’m pretty sure it’s been done, but you can try a yahtzee skill with high skill granting them extra rerolls.
It is intuitive enough and gives the player some sense of control. The fact that it’s probably not a typical system will also offer some uniqueness benefit to – at least for the first few sessions.
You might be surprised at how many people don’t want to do the math of ‘3d6 +2 +4 +5’, with different sized bonuses coming from different sources. So maybe think about either limiting the number of bonuses that can apply, like 5e does, or making each bonus/penalty the same size, like Blades in the Dark or PbtA does.
Another thing: one easy way to improve on Dungeons & Dragons is to make it so each character’s combat turn is resolved in one roll. The antithesis of what you want is 3.x, where you had to roll a first time to see if you hit, then 5% of the time (natural 20) you had to roll to see if you got a crit, and rolling for damage was Step 3.
Instead, if you’re using a bell curve, use dice of different colors that are read as different things (damage can be red). If you’re using a flat distribution like a D20, damage could be something like difference between target number and actual number of a successful roll.
(There’s a system named One Roll Engine you could look at.)
So far Turkey has been reporting zero Covid-19 infections, which is quite remarkable given that Istanbul is huge, dense, highly toured city and one of the biggest air hubs in the world. Also the Turks tend to keep relatively small interpersonal distances. Any ideas about what’s going on ?
It’s either:
a) There really aren’t any cases in Turkey. We’re at, what, ~150,000 cases worldwide, with a super uneven geographical distribution; much stranger things happen routinely.
b) There are a few, but they haven’t been detected and/or confirmed. Plausible, not unlikely – if this is the case we’ll probably see official statements soonish.
c) There are a few, and it’s being suppressed/deliberately not confirmed. Possible, not plausible in my opinion.
Guam says it has no infection, it also doesn’t have test kits.
Guam also happens to be an island that isn’t a major hub for international travel. It’s more plausible that Guam has no cases than that Istanbul has no cases.
Guam is very small but I think most of their economy is tourism from Asia.
Most of their economy is tours from other US military bases. The part of Guam that isn’t a US military base, yes, Asian tourism is a big deal, but economically speaking, Guam is mostly a US military base.
How much that aspect of Guam is isolated from the Asian-tourism aspect is an interesting question, as is the question of how much Asian tourism is actually going on right now.
I don’t know about Turkey specifically, but Hungary has found a magical cure for coronavirus: the government announced that whoever refuses quarantine gets 20 years of prison. Upon hearing this, all Hungarians immediately became completely healthy, even the regular flu was instantly cured.
Other countries are trying to get the same miracle: Russia with 5 years and Israel with 7. Again I can’t find anything about Turkey but that sounds like something Turkey would do as well.
I’m Hungarian. Hungarian healthcare is pretty poor, but that post is full of bullshit. Yes, quarantine is compulsory if ordered, like in most countries. I may have read somewhere that you may get prosecuted for homicide if you violate the quarantine, infect someone, and that someone dies. Not for every violation of quarantine. In any case, it hasn’t been widely publicized; I don’t think it’s a factor that significantly discourages reporting.
There has been some initial confusion about who is to get tested, and who tests them. Nevertheless, 12 cases have been found.
“This is typically the only doctor in your area, or in your village. The doctor is typically available once in a week.” You have a family doctor. (There are several doctors in an area, unless you live in a small village.) Family doctors are typically available on every weekday, without appointment. People are asked to call their doctors by phone if they suspect being infected with the COVID-19.
“If you wonder, in hungary, people pay about 70-80% of the salary as tax, VAT is 27% alone. Despite of this, there is almost no public services available, price of electricity and gas is amongst the highest in the world.” This is bullshit, except for the VAT. Taxes are high, but not that high, and government services are often poor, but “almost no services” is nonsense. “Hungary ended universal healthcare last year.” The change is much smaller than this makes it sound like. Every resident is obligated to pay for the public health insurance. It’s deducted from the salaries. The self-employed and the unemployed have to pay it themselves, a small fixed fee in the case of the unemployed. Earlier, those who failed to pay the fee would still get healthcare free at the point of use, while the government would try to collect the insurance fee. From this year, they are uninsured.
I am also Hungarian, and I agree with 10240. The linked article is ridiculous.
I’m Israeli. In a very technical sense the law here allows for sentencing of up to 7 years for “actions liable to spread disease”. However, in practice that law is supposed to apply to people who directly violate health regulations and create a public safety hazard (i.e. not following health regulations in restaurants or messing with the water supply). There is basically no way the health ministry could make an argument for any significant jail time that would stand up in court.
(Source: I’m dating a law student.)
Yeah, I bet there are comparable laws in US states.
Just a stupid guess:
Main infection vector in the Middle East atm seems to be Iran. The diplomatic relationships between Iran and Turkey are not that good. So Turkey get’s a lot less travell from there.
More than a million Iranian tourists enter Turkey every year, so…that seems unlikely. I’d guess they have plenty of infected people and just haven’t tested anyone yet in an attempt to project strength. Alternatively, they have tested prior and are suppressing news of an outbreak. (imho that would be pretty in character for Erdogan.)
Just for the record, this is my guess as well.
This doesn’t seem like a sufficient explanation. There are surely dozens of companies with employees that fly between Istanbul and Beijing/Shanghai/maybe Wuhan in any given week. There are likely far more companies with employees that travel between Milan and Istanbul. And there are definitely a large number of tourists who want to visit Rome, Venice, Athens, and Troy (though perhaps not that many that do this trip in January and February).
Given the number of countries that have received infections from Italy (including India!), it’s implausible that zero infected people have entered Turkey. (It’s maybe more plausible that none of them has started a local chain of transmission, if they’re all highly mobile people who are in and then out a day or two later.)
The turkish government is pretty jealous – being one of the most well known for internet takedowns and blocks, which seems like a general tendency to control information. (When I was there recently, wikipedia was blocked because it had information about Turkish Politicians that they didn’t like. ) The Turkish government has also shown it’s preference for information control with it’s denial of the Armenian genocide, arrest of journalists, and hero worship of Ataturk.
Turkey has a border with Iran which is having a massive outbreak, and it has a lot of tourism. I cannot believe it has not leaked over.
I believe the Turkish government is suppressing news of an outbreak
I assume there’s active COVID-19 infection in Syria as well, and probably among the large numbers of refugees coming into Europe from Syria by way of Turkey. It’s not so hard to imagine ways this could turn ugly really fast.
What are the best steel-manning arguments for the CDC/FDA testing bottleneck not being a colossal fuckup ?
You can’t let every schmuck with an PhD in Virology make bespoke COVID tests. Even if some are good, many won’t be. By having any tests out there that give bad information, you undermine the credibility of the tests that give good information. Contradictory results from different tests creates confusion. All of this increases the uncertainty of the public, erodes faith in institutions, and causes panic. It is panic which is the biggest concern, not COVID.
(I think the CDC’s response to COVID has been abysmal, btw.)
I’ve seen various people make this statement and it is so stupid. A virus that can actually kill you and your loved ones is more concerning than Walmart being out of toilet paper.
“The panic about X is worse than X” is based on some scenario where it’s plausibly true and memed its way in to a mantra that Very Wise People say regardless of context.
To be clear, I agree with you. That was my attempt to steel-man. I don’t believe a word of it.
Well it’s a delicate balancing act. If one guy goes out and buys an entire football teams’ worth of insulin that is a serious issue, replicated a hundred times. The US medical infrastructure has some deep structural problems when it comes to supply of generic lifesaving drugs and spikes in the consumption by people ‘stocking up’ may leave some people in distress due to a lack of access to care. Now, that’s not to say that panic is more dangerous in all cases, but it can have knock on affects that can be worse than the original fear.
Walmart being out of toilet paper for more than a few weeks means the guy who stocks TP on Walmart’s shelves is probably being laid off. More generally, economic panic is likely to result in lots of people losing their jobs, some of whom will become homeless or otherwise impoverished as a result. And I believe the mortality rate for homelessness is comparable to that for COVID-19.
So, no, it isn’t “stupid” to believe that the panic is worse than the disease. It may be wrong, but that depends on numbers that are poorly known at present and people are making their best guesses.
Being out of toilet paper will also sort of become its own problem in fairly short order.
@acymetric
Wash your ass in the shower, and than dry it with an dedicated towel, that gets washed regularly.
You drive your water bill up a little, and it is less convinient than toilet paper, but it is not less hygienic.
I suppose we’re assuming I only poop at home?
When the situation deteriorates far enough that there isn’t enough toilet paper available in your local super market for several weeks, I suspect there is a general quarantine going on in your area. So yeah, in that scenario you better only use the toilet at home. I don’t know how else the supply chain would be broken that long.
First off, Walmart is not going to start laying off people because of toilet paper shortages. At most, they will cut hours. Unfortunate, but hardly an economic catastrophe.
The word “panic” has these negative implications that don’t make that much sense in this scenario. When people “panic” over the Coronavirus, that manifests itself in people avoiding travel, not shaking hands, calling in sick, and shutting themselves in their homes. All things that we want people to do in a pandemic, even if it that does cause a drop in economic activity. Since the virus is growing exponentially, it means that this wave is going to play out in the next month or two. If it does end up reasonably contained, I don’t see the “panic” causing a recession all on its own. We should expect the government to do what it can to mitigate negative economic effects but the priority is stopping the virus. To flip the priorities is like prioritizing overhydration mitigation when there is a shortage of water.
First off, you know we aren’t actually just concerned about the toilet paper supply, right?
Second, if everyone is cutting hours across the board for months, maybe it isn’t a catastrophe (I think it very well could be) but if not it is certainly awfully close.
If people keep buying out toilet paper and other things, then so long as Walmart’s supply chains aren’t disrupted, aren’t they more likely to increase hours? A la the holiday rush, when shelves are also commonly empty.
If we need everyone to have handsoap to stop/slow the spread, and lots of people can’t get handsoap because 1 idiot panicked and bought 10 years worth, that’s an example where the panic is the problem.
Panic is by definition a bad reaction to any crisis. But taking a crisis seriously and acting accordingly, when done by lots of people at once, will look a lot like a panic. “Panic buying of toilet paper” is basically what happens when millions of people think “If I’m stuck in my house in quarantine for two weeks, I’m going to run out of toilet paper. I’d better get some extra!”
I think lots of stuff done to prevent panic is counterproductive. And honestly, one think likely to prevent me overreacting to a crisis is seeing that the authorities are competent and are taking sensible actions and giving good advice. The less competent the authorities, the less I am going to trust that they’ll do the right thing or give the right advice. CDC’s mishandling of early testing was not a good step toward reassuring everyone that they’re actually competent….
To paraphrase Mel Brooks: Basic rationality is when I stockpile two months worth of foodstuffs. Panic is when you buy one extra roll of toilet paper.
Stopping panic is very difficult. Simply saying the words “don’t panic” is likely to trigger panic.
But I would expect the Federal government, of anyone, to have the experts who know how messaging works.
Two months ago would have been a great time for POTUS or VPOTUS to say “we are monitoring this virus and our scientists are studying it closely. For now it appears contained in China, but it may eventually hit our shores. While we are wondering how we would react to such a crisis, now is a good time for every family to check if they are prepared for any kind of emergency. Even though losing power or water is very unlikely from this, there are other disasters in which this could happen. Is your family prepared in case you are stuck in your house without any utilities for three days? Now, before there is any crisis, is the time to check on that.”
This would have placed minimum stresses on stores because three days of supplies is not panic-buying, and only a fraction of people would be paying immediate attention anyway. It also projects competence, which albatross11 explained well is very important.
Also, it seems bizarre that there’s not a large enough stockpile of, say, N95 masks for healthcare workers to handle a worst-case pandemic. This suggests that nobody has done the most basic planning and preparation at the federal level for a 1918-flu-level pandemic. The time to spin up a response isn’t when the crisis is happening, it’s several years earlier when you look at historical examples of how things went down and plan out what to do. On-the-spot improvisation is maybe better than no decisionmaking at all, but having a plan up front would have been a lot better.
@Edward Scizorhands
I think messaging like that probably works for the SSC cohort. For your average American, the government saying “everything is fine; nothing to see here” means “eh, you should probably buy some extra toilet paper, dry goods and hand sanitzer.” Saying, “eh, you should buy some extra toilet paper, dry goods and hand sanitzer” means “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE STOCKPILE GUNS EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!!!!!”
For your average American, the government saying “everything is fine; nothing to see here”
That’s one reason my example speech didn’t say “everything is fine” and also emphasized generic disaster prep.
Also, a lot of people simply wouldn’t be paying any attention two months ago. Hell, what percent of Americans are aware of any of the contents of the coronavirus press conference yesterday, when everyone wants to talk about coronavirus?
Doing a smaller event two months ago would have only gotten attention from a small subset of the population, but if you can get people to prep in waves it stops sudden runs on the stores.
Figuring out what and where the runs are going to be on can be difficult. Obviously the masks were going to be in short supply. Hand sanitizer is a likely candidate, too.* But runs on TP would be tough to predict and I think was entirely a consequence of some prepper blogs talking about how Wuhan was running out of it.
(* Locally, I cannot buy hand sanitizer in the stores. But people are not desperate for it: every retail store has big bottles sitting there on the counters, and people aren’t stealing them. People will pay retail prices for it, or maybe even twice retail, but they won’t steal it.)
Reread my post. What you actually want is reasonable disaster prep. You get that by saying “everything is fine.” If you say “do reasonable disaster prep” you get panic.
@Conrad Honcho
Is that actually true, though? Everywhere I’ve lived, the government says ‘do reasonable disaster prep’ reasonably regularly, and then We The People ignore them and have hurricane parties, watch passing tornadoes from roofs, and things like that.
Frequency of disaster maybe?
If something happens every year (hurricanes, tornados, etc.) the advice of the officials is less likely to be listened to. This is our first potential disease of concern since, what, ebola in 2012?
I’m skeptical of this claim–I think “make reasonable preparations” is more likely to get reasonable responses than “everything’s fine, there’s no problem here” when the house is on fire.
If the house is on fire, the government loses credibility saying everything is okay, and I agree that loss of credibility in the government is a major cause of panic.
The goal should be to slowly ramp up people doing disaster prep, so we never have a run on goods, which causes a run on goods and hoarding. So you start with anodyne generic recommendations very early. Yes, lots of people will ignore that, but that is in some ways the goal: start small, and slowly turn up the heat. The government had months of notice that this was coming*, so there was time to take it gentle. Follow-up by doing interviews with media**, very gradually increasing the sense of urgency.
* and I think cutting off ties to China bought us another month, and I approve of Trump doing that
** For example, when doing an interview with a conservative magazine, you talk about how important self-reliance is, some time in the next month get ready. When doing an interview with a liberal magazine, you talk about how important community responsibility is, so sometime in the next month get ready.
The problem is that it is impossible for the government to tell you that “everything is fine.” If everything was fine you wouldn’t be talking to me at all. This means that there is a fundamental off-by one error and the response to any government communique in a novel situation is going to be one step higher on the preparedness scale than the words say. If the government tells you everything is fine, the response is stock up on toilet paper. If the government tells you to stock up on toilet paper, response is to stock up on guns. If the government tells you to prepare for civil disturbances, the response is to shoot the national guard and take their better guns.
It is important to remember that this only applies to novel situations where you actually listen to what the government has to say. If you’ve been through the same situation a dozen times you don’t give a flip.
steelman?
To preface: I am selfish and care more about my parents lives than GDP.
That being said, it’s plausible that the economic impact of quarantine measures around the globe and the negative impacts from resulting budget crisis, budget cuts, loss of resources etc may, long term, end up causing a higher negative QALY impact than the virus running rampant.
If a child loses their 85 year old grandmother it’s a tragedy.
If that same child’s grandmother gets to live to 87 instead…. but as a long term effect of the costs of quarintine the child’s school gets big budget cuts, their local hospital big budget cuts and the economy is in the toilet when they look for their first job, the total knock-on negative impact on their life from the efforts to save their grandmother may be worse than the negative impact on their grandmother of not doing so.
Under that model, the panic on the international scale, may well be worse than the disease.
While I think that the reactions are relatively appropriate, I wonder how much I am biased by being a UMC that would be minimally impacted by sheltering in place for a month. (My wife and I both do remote work, me for a large company that is extremely unlikely to do layoffs, my wife for a medical company which will only see strict job growth in the coming months.) Maybe I’m just taken in.
There are all the seeds of irrational groupthink here. That doesn’t mean the group is wrong. But it could be.
I have to believe a fair bit (please don’t take that as an attack, it is not intended as one, we all bring our biases to the table here). I wonder what % employees can work remotely, and what % of businesses can sustain themselves with their employees working remotely for x months.
Also for businesses that are strictly in-person operations (music venues, restaurants, bars, child care, so on and so forth), how many can sustain themselves while the % that can work from home are working from home and aren’t out patronizing places.
FWIW, I’m in the same position as you (my company would be perfectly fine working remotely, although our revenue would probably temporary drop as client volume decreases since our clients are all offering strictly in-person services).
I have to believe a fair bit (please don’t take that as an attack, it is not intended as one, we all bring our biases to the table here).
No attack taken. I am definitely biased.
That doesn’t mean I’m wrong, but it means I have to think carefully about being wrong.
Maybe the goal is to kill as many old people as possible to avoid paying pensions (which are currently unpayable). Then the government’s actions are perfectly reasonable. In related news, the Surgeon General says you don’t need a mask.
I assume this is intended as sarcasm, but I’ve seen it or variations on a lot of sites, blogs, etc. lately. (“Just kill off the boomers” and such.) It’s really not helpful, and not even correct.
Many sources of information on covid-19 talk about “elderly and infirm” people, without making clear whether it’s intended to mean “people who elderly and also infirm,” or “people who are elderly” and “people who are infirm.” My belief is they mean the latter. Mortality charts don’t seem to make the distinction, but even so, most predict high mortality only for people who are over 80 (and infirm? or not?).
Demographic information shows that people over 65 make up only 16% of the population. Estimates of mortality for those 80+ years old suggest (conservatively) 15% mortality, and 8% for those 70-80.
This is not going to be enough to “avoid paying pensions (which are currently unpayable)”. In any case, Social Security is still solvent. Future solvency could be achieved by removing the contribution cap (or raising it), or lower benefits. Either would be controversial (though several US Presidential candidates have proposed raising the cap), but the actual percentage amounts are relatively small.
The US is going to go bankrupt from overspending, not from Social Security payments.
Social security payments are spending.
I do not actually advocate this approach, but I’d give about 20% probability that the US government is really doing it.
You seem to be saying that the death of 8% of people 70-80 and 15% of 80+ can’t be enough to pay the benefits but lowering the payments just a little bit would be enough because “actual percentage amounts are relatively small”. This is confusing. Lowering benefits to everyone by 10% is (fiscally) roughly the same as killing 10% of everybody, no? Why one would be enough but not the other?
Removing the contribution cap might work short-term, but sooner or later the country will owe unlimited benefits for those unlimited contributions. Who’s going to pay those?
Just to be clear, you think that it is as likely that a surreptitious policy of the United States Government was to deliberately sabotage our own pandemic testing regime in order to kill enough old people to put social security spending on a lower level as it would be to roll a 17+ on a d20?
This is nuts, but lets work through what would have to happen for this to be the case:
1. This kind of policy couldn’t be thought up on the fly. You’d have to start planning in advance to ensure that everyone toed the party line. This means that in a time of good public health, people who were very concerned about the budget had to think up this idea.
2. They would then have to decide that marginally slowing down testing would be the best way to implement this plan and develop protocols for the creation of flawed testing devices.
3. They would then have to approach senior leaders within the FDA and CDC, people who have a lifetime history of caring very deeply about public health and convince them that caring about the budget is more important. At the very least, you’re getting numerous people to violate their Hippocratic oath and likely exposing them to jail/public castigation if this ever got out.
4. Current political leadership really likes old people, depends on their support and would, presumably, be furious about this. This means you either need to do it in complete secrecy from the numerous political appointees at all these agencies OR secretly convince current leadership that killing off on of the President’s most loyal bases of support during an election year is a smart play.
5. You then need to find a way to keep this information completely contained to such an extent that it never gets out.
I’d rate the probability of any of these things happening as ludicrously low. All of them happening together isn’t worth talking about. 20%, to me, sounds insane. What is making you so confident this is happening?
@Aftagley
1. I’m sure that they have modeled various economic scenarios. It’s their job to do so. The Fed has cut rates to offset the coronavirus – that means they did some modeling, and surely somebody somewhere modeled social benefits too.
2. To be clear, I do not believe that the government deliberately made an error in the testing device. The government’s influence is in how they react to this, specifically in whether they allow the hospitals to assemble the device properly or insist on sticking to the useless regulations.
3. FDA/CDC people don’t have to be in on this. But when FDA/CDC requests a lockdown or a quarantine, they will get a response “yeah, that could help, but the political cost is too much, we can’t do it, sorry”.
But I have to say though that my estimate jumped to 20% after hearing that you don’t need masks. If this train of thought is correct, then yes, top health people are in.
4.
Or maybe the Deep State, whose existence was first denied by the Democrats but then acknowledged and welcomed, wants to accomplish exactly what you’ve said.
5. They have kept global surveillance contained until Snowden, and since then they’ve got better at containing their shit and intimidating whistleblowers (see Assange). And this is much simpler to contain because you don’t need a lot of people in. Just say “no we can’t limit travel like China and Italy” long enough.
Mostly through refuge in audacity. It did leak several times before, including the 1972 leak of ECHELON and the 2006 leak of AT&T room 641A. There were other smaller leaks. But anyone recognizing this got smeared as a tinfoil-hatter for believing in such a huge operation.
The Deep State, or something like it, exists, but as a bloc, not a conspiracy: there is a collection of mid- to high-ranking lifers in government and in various quasi-governmental institutions (universities, NGOs, etc.) that forms a power center independent of the formal branches of government, they share various interests, including an interest in expanding state power, and they can be expected, on the average, to tend toward taking actions and encouraging opinions consistent with those interests. But they’re not taking orders from the Deep President or anything, and they don’t see themselves as agents of the Deep State, nor coordinate much more than, say, people in the dog rescue business do. They have individual but not collective agency. And they have ordinary morals and ethics.
What you’re suggesting takes collective agency, discipline, top-down direction, and a huge amount of ruthlessness.
I din’t think so, or at least not the way I imagine scenarios like this. It just takes a lot of people with decision making power who have other priorities than the lives of folks who are poor, old, minority, or otherwise not like them.
We’ve seen inadequate measures in the face of multiple disasters, related possibly to underfunded or badly led US federal agencies with the primary mission of handling such things (FEMA + Katrina being the earliest one that comes to mind.) We’ve seen various restrictions originally imposed with the intent of preventing some bad thing from happening again, lifted as impairing economic development (and besides, the event hadn’t recurred [yet], and therefore never would.)
A few people may be comic book villains, trying to reduce future costs by culling those they regard as useless or undeserving, but they aren’t required to get the same overall effect – of course we want to [do worthwhile thing] it’s just that getting promoted/increasing GDP/getting re-elected are more important [in this particular case]…. Most likely they even fool themselves.
I wouldn’t put the odds as high as 20% for conscious intent, unless I were writing a political thriller, but poor incentives and lack of concern for folks one doesn’t empathize with – absolutely. The only real question is how strong this effect is, and what counterbalances it.
@Nornagest
This would be the best case. However, government silently taking over institutions is a classical maneuver. It’s definitely done in Russia (link in Russian).
Of course Russian institutions are far more degraded than American, so maybe US isn’t doing it. But the important part here is how little influence is needed to achieve something like this. It doesn’t need to be a secret society or a conspiracy, it’s just some talks nudging some people in one direction.
Also the French government has ordered a terrorist bombing upon Greenpeace and was all like “what? no, we’re a civilized democratic government, we would never do that” until it became clear to everybody that they did exactly that. This isn’t directly connected to US – I’m from Europe so only European examples come to my mind – but that’s why arguments like “the government can’t possibly be that evil” do not sound very convincing to me.
The strongest case would be normal bureaucratic slowness, aka your normal libertarian criticism of government. Its probably the best hypothesis. Is that a “colossal fuckup”? Perhaps in this one situation, but its actually kind of the intentional path those agencies have chosen over the last 40 years.
The second strongest case is far too CW to discuss in an even thread.
Marvel Comics once did a storyline, “House of M”, where Magneto has conquered the world, making it a monarchy where his children are to succeed him and mutants unrelated to him are legally privileged above normal humans.
It’s well-known that Magneto is a Jew, but I don’t know if the mothers of his children are, and none of the three practice Judaism. So would it still be incorrect for this government’s subjects to say “Jews rule the world”?
While it is correct in some sense, I think it misses the point. In this hypothetical world, while the rulers at the very top are Jews, there are (I assume) many other lower-echelon rulers who aren’t, and there are many Jews who aren’t involved in the ruling. The statement’s usually taken to mean that the majority of Jews have some “in” or preferential treatment by the government, which doesn’t seem to be the case.
+1, good point. Anti-Semitism of the “Jews are in charge” type is the speaker insinuating that a majority of Jews have some “in” with the rulers to get preferential treatment (we could fairly say something analogous about Ivy graduates: not every individual joins the American ruling class by graduation, but in a majority of cases you get ruling class privilege), not a pedantic “there exist at least two Jews who rule the world.”
It would be Lèse-Magnetté
Nice.
It’s matrilineal, so probably not.
My morality isn’t based on what’s “cosmically” valuable, because as far as I can tell, the cosmos are a bunch of stars that aren’t conscious and don’t value anything. My morality is based on what I and other sentient beings like me value. I value not being in pain, and so do many others.
Covered under “so do many others,” being that the puppies, bears, and Jim’s Wife likely value not being in pain.
When I say something is right / wrong / moral / immoral, I mean more than just that I personally approve or disapprove of it. I think morality is essentially the process of trying to agree upon shared values, and collectively enforce them, with people whose values are at least somewhat similar to my own.
If Jim is a sane human being, then his brain architecture is similar enough to mine that he can’t be operating on completely alien values. When I say that it’s wrong for him to kick puppies, I mean that if I and perhaps some particularly eloquent people who agree with me talked to him until we all came to an agreement, we would convince him that he actually should not kick puppies, since to do so would be contrary to whatever appreciation for cute animals newly arose out of his latent “babies = good” circuitry. Maybe Jim would convince us that it’s actually fine to kick puppies, though I think that’s unlikely.* In that case, I would say that I’d been wrong.
What if Jim is an incurable sociopath and he and I will never come to an agreement? Then I say that he’s outside the set of agents I can build a moral consensus with, and that he’s just wrong by my standards–the standards I care about. Perhaps he and I could still come to a meta-moral agreement about respecting each others differences as long as we aren’t doing anything too heinous in the others eyes. But if he keeps beating his wife I will call the police to have the people who agree with me enforce consequences, his values be damned.
ETA: To expand on the “he would probably agree with me eventually” point: Most people care at least a little bit about at least a few people who are not them. If Jim is a moral mutant who truly cares only for himself, nothing I say will convince him to care about others; but most people are not moral mutants. As I said, we’ve all got the same basic brain architecture.
*If I thought that talking to someone who believed in kicking puppies would, on average, increase my acceptance of puppy-kicking, then I could skip the conversation and accept puppy-kicking more just based on that anticipation. Conservation of expected evidence and whatnot.
You seem to be trying to prove discursively that other cultures don’t exist, only your early 21st century Anglosphere culture and individual sociopaths.
@Le Maistre Chat
That’s not what I’m saying. I think that coming to a consensus on morality with…idk, a 13th-century Chinese person, would definitely be harder than coming to a consensus with an American across the aisle from me. Still, we’re both humans and I think it would be possible given enough time.
That isn’t to say that I think I’d convince them that my moral system was completely correct. Doubtlessly there would be issues where they convinced me I was in the wrong, and ones where they didn’t convince me completely but weakened my positions. Perhaps I think that my ideals would be on the whole more convincing, since they’re the product of more years of history, but I certainly don’t think that my current understanding of morality is the ultimately correct one.
(where “correct” is defined as “what I would believe after I had infinite time to discuss morality with every past, current, and future human”)
Ah, I see.
How much can a government taking an epidemic seriously inflate how serious the epidemic itself seems?
My basic understanding of how China reacted to this current thing is “oh, fuck, we got in real trouble with our people last time for not taking this seriously – let’s do every last thing we possibly can on this one”. It seems like that would make this seem worse in terms of estimates of how many people have this, since they’d be testing more and looking harder for infected individuals.
Since nobody talks about this, I assume it must be wrong in some way, but how?
I don’t think an accurate count of the number of infections and more precise estimate of the death rate will make it seem worse. To the contrary, it just means they don’t have to do as much work to infer infection rates.
If anything, undercounting the denominator (#killed/#infected) makes the disease seem more deadly than it really is, at least for a naive analysis.
China reacted very strongly at first because the first known cases had a very high death rate. Presumably, at first they were only diagnosing very sick people. So they thought this is the second coming of SARS.
With more data, it seems to not be quite that bad, but still bad enough that Italy is taking unprecedented measures trying to contain it.
For the average person, “Italy shut down the soccer league” is probably a more worrying signal than bickering over whether the death rate is 2% or 5%.
I guess if there was no government reaction at all, this might just be considered an unusually bad flu season? But the results of a few weeks of uncontrolled spread in Wuhan and Iran seem to show that it’s quite serious.
Overloading the health system would lead to (independently) higher visibility and higher death rates. So definitely more than just a bad flu season.
I’m hearing reports that Lombardy, Italy has already hit it’s respirator limits and are forced to triage patients to the extent that patients over 65 are not intubated.
twitter source
There have been other messages from Italian doctors circulating on twitter that confirm both the war-like atmosphere and the brutal level of triage.
I think we’d hear about that kind of hospital overloading either way. Here’s hoping we take extreme measures in the US
At first, Serie A just suspended northern Italian matches. Then postponed some. Then played the derby d’Italia behind closed doors.
Today in Champions League, the match in Spain was behind closed doors but the match in Germany had fans.
I wanted to compare my lived experience(maybe get medical advice?) with other people and I don’t have a social life so here goes.
I experience what I would describe as comparatively intense physiological reactions to being hungry. Compared to my other physiological reactions to other stimulus. If I get to about, two hours after I would normally eat, I start to get a headache, feel sort of nauseous, get knots in my stomach, feel light headed and fatigued, these symptoms all resolve quickly after eating and get more intense the longer I wait. Although if I wait long enough( 6-12 hours) they mostly go away, I voluntarily fasted for about 80 hours once and after the first day it was actually pretty easy. I also get very tired if I over eat, although I have seen at least a few references in media and such of other people also experiencing this.
Related, I seem to get noticeably hungry when I engage in more cognitively difficult tasks. For example when I am playing MTG, or trying to write, or playing HS arena. In contrast playing most other games, drawing/painting, HS battlegrounds, does not generate this response, ever. It is actually a little depressing if I am correct about this, because I experience it very rarely these days(and never from work) and it makes me think I am not using my brain enough.
I had a physical about 8 months ago, and would say I have had these reaction to hunger/thinking hard for as long as I can remember.
Does this match other peoples experience? Is this what being Hangry is about? Do I have diabetes or something?
IANAD. It looks a bit like what happened to me when I ate a sugary diet for a few days. Might be worth trying a low glicemic index diet for a week or so and see if anything changes.
This seems like low risk advice, I will look into it thanks.
This matches my experience – I experimented with a keto-y diet and with a carbful diet while I was doing intermittent fasting and I found the carbful one had a much stronger feeling of hunger. The keto-y one made me feel like a superman who never has to eat again if I didn’t want too.
Also, OP do you exercise? regular exercise plays a big role in regulating hunger, sleep, general wellbeing, etc.
I can second this. I have a low-carb diet (i.e. keto-adjacent) and the same experience.
Also worth noting: I no longer have any energy fluctuations of note during a given day. I wake up with a certain energy level that I keep until I go to bed; no ‘food coma’, no sudden spike in energy (unless I drink caffeine, which I try not to overstimulate myself with, so it remains quite effective on me).
The only issue I continue to have on low-carb is getting enough calories (I’m still struggling a little with a weight-drop I don’t want; I’m already very lean!). So if you experiment with this, remember to add oils and fats to your food, whatever is in there naturally may not be enough to keep you energised. 🙂 Olive oil is a great and safe to drizzle on just about any finished meal. (I wouldn’t suggest frying with it, as it doesn’t deal well with high temperatures. If you want an flavourful oil to fry with, coconut oil is a nice choice.)
Also, if you do go low-carb, be aware that (depending on how sensitive your individual metabolism is to the degree you’ve cut your carbs) you may have a phase of up to a handful of days with headaches and/or flu-like symptoms. This is fine – colloquially speaking, this is your body freaking out a bit about running out of carbs to burn. It’ll pass.
In any case, whether you end up trying this or not, good luck getting your distracting hunger under control, Spookykou!
Data point: what you’re describing is very unfamiliar to me, and I would guess it’s uncommon in general, but I can’t be sure. I pretty routinely go 20 to 24 hours without eating, though, which is almost certainly not standard, so I’m not exactly normal either.
Regardless of how much time has passed, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced hunger the way you’re describing. Even fairly serious hunger is sort of this dull ache in the background that’s mostly psychological and barely registers as a physical feeling. At a guess, what you’re talking about might be what would happen to me after several days or a week without food, when starvation proper starts to kick in?
This matches my experience, except that I eat on a mostly regular schedule. If I feel anything at all, it’s a dull ache in my gut as you mentioned (or maybe even more of a tightness than ache). I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed any congintive decrease as a result of hunger, even on the rare day that I get busy and forget to eat until 7 or 8 pm.
That said, there are definitely people who react much more strongly to hunger, similar to the OP. I have no idea which is more common, or what either would indicate.
Hmm.. I think I react less to hunger than many, and generally go for fewer and larger meals, three, possibly two meals per day. No nausea or headaches, just a gnawing sensation from my stomach wanting to be filled up – which tends to go away or diminish after a while. And yes, tired after eating a large meal, and also after long and fairly intense exercise. I assume you were checked for diabetes or other insulin/blood sugar issues in your medical? I’m no expert, but that’s my first association for your symptoms.
Hunger often seems to negatively affect mood of other people, making them short tempered and aggressive. I get that way when thirsty, or mentally exhausted and under cognitive stress, or when crowded in – but as far as I can determine, not much from hunger (which could still be some kind of observer bias).
I don’t recognize getting more or less hungry depending on cognitively intensity of work (but from physical exercise, sure).
Your experiences match up pretty well with mine, except maybe somewhat more severe. Are you female? (I am) A persistent thing that I hear is that male and female differences to fasting vary systematically, and that it has fewer good health effects for women, physiologically.
My symptoms from skipping meals start with hunger, go on to intense hunger, light-headedness, feeling fuzzy in the head and unable to think, end up with nausea, headache, and lying in a darkened room sipping flat lemonade till I fall asleep (that’s “skipped both breakfast and lunch” level – not always, but often enough)
I remember a (male) friend of mine doing the 5-2 diet, and I said to him “don’t you get hungry?”. And his reply was “only at mealtimes”. Honestly, that reply might as well have come from Alpha Centauri as far as I’m concerned … this “going from hungry to not-hungry via some method other than eating” thing is pretty much not a thing in my world.
I understand people’s experiences on this can differ substantially.
I am male, and I would say I am oddly similar to your friend in that I can train myself to have a new schedule. I went for almost two years eating only two meals a day for example, and once I got used to it, my body also got used to it, but if I missed one of my two established meal times then I would be in trouble. Currently I am on three meals a day and skipping breakfast is pretty horrible.
To reference Scott stuff since I am on SSC, it feels like my set-points are both aggressively enforced and highly malleable.
I am very similar (also female like Emby). I get “hangry” pretty readily and experience increasing anxiety and irritability with hunger. Also get malaise when very hungry. I did have an eating disorder in college and at the time noticed that if I pushed through, I felt entirely fine. I think it might be blood sugar related–usually drinking juice or pop is enough to take away the worst symptoms, though not always.
Your experience of hunger more or less matches mine, although it sounds like your reaction is quicker and more intense. If I skip breakfast and lunch, I start to get some of the symptoms you describe—mild stomach pain, light-headedness, feeling tired and mentally slow—around 2 or 3 pm. I also sometimes become more emotionally volatile and start feeling anxious or panicky. If I don’t realize that my emotions are heightened by hunger, I can react badly, but as soon as I attribute them to a physical cause they become much more manageable. All symptoms peak and start to diminish on the same day; by 24 hours fasting, fatigue is usually the only symptom left. I’ve never noticed increased hunger as a result of difficult cognitive tasks, but I have learned to avoid those tasks when I’m very hungry, since I have trouble focusing. (I’m female, if that makes a difference.)
During periods when I fasted on a regular basis, I became much better at it—for one thing, I figured out that the “existential crises” I was going through were physiological and learned how to work around them cognitively, but the physical symptoms also diminished significantly within a few weeks of fasting once a week. So practice might help reduce hunger pains in the long term.
Sounds somewhat more severe, but similar to my own experience. I get more hungry doing brain work than exercising, though AFTER exercising I get hungry with a vengeance.
Sounds like what happens to me with caffeine withdrawal.
If you figure it out let me know. I have the same problem. I can’t go more than 2-3 hours without eating before I get very irritable, tired, and have trouble concentrating. I also have to eat a big meal before going to bed, otherwise I can’t sleep. All this has been causing me to gain weight. The irritability actually really affects my relationships as well, so I kind of have to choose between being skinny and being nice to my friends. I’m seeing an endocrinologist about it. My blood sugar numbers are stellar apparently, so the only things left to rule out are extremely rare tumoral endocrine disorders. 🤷♂️
Similar problem here, normal blood (not diabetes). I recently started drinking tea again, which is when symptoms began, so caffeine withdrawal is a likely candidate accordingly to commenter Dack above.
I have never gotten headaches or felt nauseous, etc. from being hungry. However, being hungry definitely makes it difficult to concentrate on mentally demanding tasks.
The symptoms after not eating sound similar, though not identical, to what my mother experiences. She’s hypoglycemic. Probably worth getting blood work etc, since there are a number of things this might be.
As for being tired after large meals, and getting hungrier after doing intellectually challenging tasks : I think that’s normal.
This strikes me as unusual. It certainly doesn’t match my experience – hunger is an (occasionally distracting, usually ignorable) gnawing feeling, but it doesn’t make me light-headed or give me headaches or anything, and as long as I eat once during the day I can skip meals with near-impunity. I know people who get indecisive if they don’t eat for too long; one of them has also had gestational diabetes, and our theory is that it’s a blood sugar issue – gestational diabetes being IIRC a risk factor for ordinary diabetes – but that’s a theory.
Heavy brain use might drop my weight but it’s hard to tell; too many confounding factors. I don’t think it messes that much with hunger, though; the only thing that does that is persistent cold. (Think insufficiently-insulated house in winter somewhere where it snows.)
Overeating can make me tired, though I think that’s recent – at least I don’t remember it from childhood – and I have to actually overeat; ordinary meals are fine.
In an earlier OT, we gave life advice to Bob, an exactly average young man(average looks, average intellect, average fitness, average across the board). In this thread, let’s raise our sights a bit and give some advice to Chuck, who is 75th percentile in everything, and graduating from high school this year.
Is Chuck 75th percentile among people within the US, or among people in the world? This is important to decide whether they should apply to college.
In the US.
Visualizations for covid19 and media coverage, and comparison with other microbes.
Dead links?
They weren’t dead for me this morning, so they must have gone down in the meanwhile.
I had to refresh a few times.
Working now. Server overload?
If anyone still has problems accessing the first link, here’s a direct link to the image embedded on the page, which is an AWS S3 resource and so perhaps a little more resilient than the nginx servers of Information Is Beautiful itself: https://infobeautiful4.s3.amazonaws.com/2020/03/corona-full.png
Seems like people here would get a kick out of this extremely detailed account of “The Infernal Kingdom” (i.e., Hell), including maps, illustrations, and facts about its language, alphabet, economy, flag, anthem, etc. It’s called The Stellar Almanac: https://twitter.com/deathbybadger/status/1234423909434392577
Mega-cool. Thanks for sharing. Too bad all the copies I could find are gone. But hope springs eternal as the authors’ are thinking of republishing it.
The fact they’ve got beauracratic forms for Hell is a thing of beauty.
Possibly in the vein of this book, I’ve been doing a bit of speculative theology lately, and I wound up thinking about religion in early hunter gatherers. Anyone know of interesting reading on the area?
Note the Lovecraftian implications of looking for a book about the Infernal Kingdom that can’t be found for sale or in a library.
Payments on mortgages to be suspended across Italy after coronavirus outbreak
Can somebody explain to me, how this will not lead to an impolsion of the whole Italian banking sector? Because to me as an economic layman it sounds like the kind of scenario that kills banks.
It’s probably not great for banks but if managed / coordinated well it does not need to lead to bank collapses. Banks collapse when their assets (such as mortgages) are demonstrated (or strongly implied) to be worth a lot less than expected, and people begin to suspect that the assets might not add up to enough money to cover everyone’s deposits.
Normally, if someone stops paying their mortgage, that is evidence that the mortgage is worth less than expected, and the bank is meant to “write it down” (mark it as worth less than face value). But in this case, if payments are suspended nationally by force majeure, on the theory that people can’t pay now but will be able to pay in full at some point soon as long as you don’t kick them out of their house in the meantime, then the bank does not need to conclude that the mortgage is worth any less than expected. In some countries, having to wait a few months for money means that money is actually worth a lot less (due to inflation), but that is not a major issue in the Eurozone – so banks should not have to make major write-downs yet just because of the suspension. Of course, if it looks like the economic dislocation will last many months and affect borrowers’ ability to pay in the long run, then additional measures will be needed.
The lack of cash coming in from borrowers, while it might seem like an issue, is also not a major problem – since the central bank can just agree to accept those same mortgages as collateral for lines of credit that it provides to affected banks (basically, a given bank will “pledge” some of its stock of mortgages and other securities like corporate bonds, etc to the central bank, and in exchange the central bank will top up the bank’s own account with cash to replace the cash that would have ordinarily come from borrowers. This cash can then be used to give to any depositors who want their money back, and/or to make new loans as needed.
1.) The payments are just being suspended. The money is still owed and will be paid, with a case between “in lump once the relief is over” and “just extended the mortgage X months, where X is how many it was suspended.”
2.) The government has promised to make mortgage holders whole and has ten billion euros to spend on this kind of thing.
3.) Mortgages are much rarer in Italy than in the US, something like 10-20% of Italians have a mortgage.
4.) After 2008, the Italian government pursued a strategy of encouraging its own citizens to buy its bonds. This means an unusual amount of debt is held by citizens, who are more willing to take hits for patriotic reasons and less likely to result in capital flight if they trust the government’s response.
5.) Their foreign creditors have been reassured by various parties that have an interest in seeing quarantines maintained that they will be supported.
6.) The politicians doing this are populists and not as concerned with long term economics, as most populists aren’t.
The long term “loser” in this is the (mostly future) Italian taxpayer (and to a lesser extent other taxpayers) who will be forced to cover the costs. That said, I suspect most people would vote yes on something like, “Would you be willing to have your tax money go towards coronavirus relief, now and in the future?”
I don’t know the particulars of this case but there are a lot of ways around these issues. The big hit for US banks in 2008 was the mark to market issues and the need to suddenly raise capital against the drop in securities prices, those were larger than the (early) individual payments missed.
Hurray, still working through SR. Thought I had a breakthrough at one point, so I’ll work through that example, then explain the issue I have.
Two large clocks are synchronized. It is noon, so they see each other as being at 11:00. A ship is preparing to depart from one clock, we’ll call it A, to the other clock, we’ll call it B. It accelerates over one second to .86601 C (which if I’ve done the math correctly results in a negligible difference of .85/1 second time dilation), and travels to B, where it accelerates at .86601 C, to another effect we can neglect. I am definitely neglecting these periods of time; consider the following thoughts to happen entirely between them.
It takes ~69 minutes to make the journey from A and B’s perspective, and ~35 minutes from the ship’s perspective. It arrives at 1:09 B local time, it’s own clock showing 12:35. A doesn’t see this until 2:09. If the ship immediately turned around and went back, it would arrive at 2:18 A local time, it’s own clock showing 1:10.
Everything is great.
Okay, the issue: What about B’s journey from the ship’s perspective?
Well, with length contraction, from the ship’s perspective B began moving at 11:30 local ship time, 11:00 on B. (11:00 without, that just makes things worse.). It “arrives” at the same time – it has to – 1:09. So B’s clock ticks 129 minutes, where the ship’s clock ticks around 65. Which is the right ratio, but in the wrong direction, considering whose perspective I think I am correctly taking; B’s clock is ticking faster than it should be, rather than slower. And considering the velocity should be equivalent (equal length and time contraction, so equal velocity), there is a curious discrepancy in the distance traveled, even treating the Lorentz factor as inverted.
I’m reasonably certain these are supposed to be symmetrical, so what am I doing wrong?
No, the perspective of an accelerating observer and a non-accelerating observer are not symmetrical. You can’t use the same time dilation equations to predict what an accelerating observer should observe. The Principle of Special Relativity is only that all inertial frames can be treated equally, not non-inertial frames.
For example, imagine that A, B, and C all have free-hanging pendulums with them. When C sees B begin to move C will also see that B’s pendulum hangs unperturbed while C’s own pendulum swings backwards. Likewise, B will see his own pendulum stay still while C’s pendulum swings backwards.
C then knows that he is the only one accelerating, and that he has to use different equations for calculating B’s time change than he would if he weren’t accelerating.
Considering only the timeframe between accelerations, isn’t the ship an inertial observer?
Correct, which means that both B and C should get the same answer to the question “how much time elapses for C between Event:AccelStop and Event:AccelStart”?
But they the calculations they do to get that answer may not be symmetrical. C simply watches his own clock.
B watches his clock and watches C, works out the time of Event:AccelStop according to B’s own clock, works out the time of Event:AccelStart according to B’s own clock, then divides the difference between those two times by C’s gamma factor (relative to B). If he does all those steps correctly he will get the same number that C’s clock reports.
(NOTE: B needs the time between the actual times of Event:Accel[Stop/Start] in his reference frame, not the times he sees the events happen. He was to work backwards with the propagation time of the light to get the real times.)
Yeah, that is all the first section, on the observations of the clocks. Worked that out, everything works neatly. (Initially incorrectly had the ship starting at 11 from B’s perspective, but sorted that out after I started to repeat the same error for A and had the ship arriving… uh. Way too early.)
It is the ship’s perspective during the inertial period that isn’t working out the way I’d expect. The only way I can see to arrive at the right answers is to assume the ship gets light from the future, such that the clock B shows a later time than it otherwise would.
ETA: The time it would need to see B start moving is 12:52. What is interesting to me there is that also happens to be the distance divided by the speed of light, times the speed of the ship. .86601*60, about 52. I can make sense of that if that is the case. If not I’m back to wondering what my math error was.
My guess is that the mistake you’re making is somewhere in one of the phrases like “the time it would need to see B start moving”
When you make statements like that in relativistic settings you need to be really careful with
1. The time according to whose clock?
2. The time C sees B start moving or the time or the time B starts moving? Those are two very different questions.
Mixing up any of the answers to those questions can lead to weird results, and the more complicated you make your situation the harder it becomes to keep it all straight.
The ETA was on how far in the future the light would have to come from; and yeah, you’d need to add another thirty minutes on top of that for the light to actually arrive, so the ship would be receiving light that is 82 minutes from the future. Why that makes sense to me is getting off topic, though. (Although it does relate to the reason I started diving back into trying to understand the behavior of time in SR).
Setting that aside, what should the ship observe during it’s inertial phase? Because it looks like it should think the clock took 129 minutes in clock-time and 65 minutes in ship-time to traverse one light hour at .86601 C which is just a pile of contradictions.
It sounds like maybe you are getting mixed up between the “optical illusion” type stuff that comes from having things moving around and the fundamental calculations.
When C reaches B, both C and B’s clocks will have a particular reading. Those two readings are unambiguous and everyone must agree on what those readings will be, even A. There can be no observer ambiguity about what the clocks will read because there is only one of each clock and only one point in spacetime that we’re talking about.
The easiest way of calculating what C’s clock will read is to use C’s velocity relative to A and use the integral we talked about last time. It is also easiest to predict what B’s clock will read using the A (or B) reference frame.
In principle you can also use C’s reference frame to predict what C’s clock will read and what B’s clock will read, but you cannot use the same formulae you used when in A’s reference frame because C is not an inertial obserer the whole time. The correct formula will depend on the acceleration of C.
By the way the reason I am not telling you how to calculate the time from the perspective of the accelerating ship is because while I know how to do it in principle I’ve never worked it out and it’s kind of a pain.
Working backwards…
Einstein’s solution appears to handle the non-inertial observer as being in a gravity well; considered from this perspective, the ship is accelerating towards the clock. So the idea that it would tick faster from the ship’s perspective isn’t surprising. The amount it ticks faster is surprising as hell, but I probably exceeded the maximum acceleration by hitting .86601 C in one second, and even if not that’s still an insane rate, so insane results shouldn’t be too surprising.
So it makes sense the ship will see light from the future from clock B. Sort of. There might be some causality issues, assuming maximum acceleration doesn’t clamp that possibility off, which it probably does.
If it is seeing light from the future, it makes sense for the light to reflect the exact time necessary to make the SR equation work out. A time which also happens to be the ship’s Lorentz Contracted measured distance, plus the clock’s measurement of the distance times the velocity divided by the speed of light. Maybe.
I think I understand now what you’re trying to do, and I think I will try to work it out tonight.
I’m going to calculate two things
1. The reading B sees on C’s clock as a function of the reading B sees on his own clock.
2. The reading C sees on B’s clock as a function of the reading C sees on his own clock.
There are two factors that affect these calculations, the time dilation effects, and the light-travel-time effects. The travel-time effects are pretty straightforward. The time-dilation effects are harder because it requires inverting that nasty accelerating-time-dilation formula we came up with last time. I will probably have to do it numerically.
I don’t expect the two graphs to be symmetric, but I don’t actually have good instincts for what they will look like. I am confident about how to calculate them though.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to do.
Getting into the crackpot stuff again, I had a question, when considering seeing the rotated stuff in the past, whether that stuff would be seeing light from the future (basically). There was also the question of what, exactly, the idea of the rotation in time meant; I’m pretty sure at this point it is fairly straightforward (or at least as straightforward as time gets).
Now I’m vaguely curious whether I stumbled across an easier way of calculating (approximating?) the effect of acceleration on time, but that’s somewhat less interesting to me.
Edit:
Also, thank you for your time. I’ll try to avoid bugging you on this stuff for a while; my brain hasn’t been willing to be quiet about it for the last few months, but I think it is starting to quiesce again.
I wouldn’t. Approximately half the population actively distrusts the federal government and assumes they are lying about most everything.
And most of the people who don’t necessarily have an innate distrust of the federal government in general do have a distrust of its current leadership in specific.
(Matt M: I think this comment got lost and belongs elsewhere.)
I’m getting (for the time observed on clock B by the ship) the following equation:
1/c * integral(v + (v^2 + a*x)/lamda )
I am working backwards, so my approach is error prone. I’m curious if that is the right equation, though, if you end up finishing.
(And today I learned I do not have the mathematical expertise to work with rapidity, my initial approach, with any confidence.)
ETA: I missed the term for time itself, which thinking about it, is probably the crunchy one. I could ignore it as negligible for my example problem because the effect was negligible, but for more continuous acceleration, it probably starts to matter a lot more.
Where’s the 11:30 coming from? The direction is wrong because that number is wrong. It should be after 12:00 and not before.
If the ship started moving at 12:00, ship time, from it’s perspective, the clock B had to have started moving a half hour before that (ship time), using Lorentz Contraction, since it would have taken a half hour from the ship’s perspective for the clock’s movement to reach it.
I saw elsewhere that Santa Clara County in CA has banned large gatherings of 1,000 people. Let’s leave aside the merits of banning such gatherings, as we’re hashing that out plenty in other comment threads. Does Santa Clara County actually have the authority to issue and enforce such a ban? It seems to me that it might not stand up to legal challenges, if someone were inclined to challenge it, and it isn’t clear to me what they would do or be able to do of someone just went ahead and had a gathering anyway, but I admit I don’t really know much about the topic and those are just my vague gut intuitions.
My guess is “no,” but I don’t think it matters because most people probably agree it’s a good idea to do this until the virus blows over.
It could be unconstitutional, but what kind of person is popular enough to invite 999 people to a gathering but doesn’t mind becoming such a high-profile case for social shaming?
Someone with a lot of money on the line?
Oh, and Donald Trump, of course.
If you can get 999 people to come to a party in the midst of an epidemic, you are probably popular enough to be immune to social shaming.
It worked for that Korean church right up until they got caught virus-handed.
The same thought occurred to me. My guess is they only have the direct authority to do it for events that happen on government property or in public spaces that require city or county permits for large events. It also acts to mark a Schelling Point, where (as Conrad observed) private event organizers take their cues from the county, cancel or postpone their own events, and tell anyone who complains that they’re just following the county’s guidelines. Likewise, people who would have attended the events will probably see the ban announcement and assume the events are cancelled whether the organizers actually cancel them or not.
There’s also an indirect effect on liability: if a private event on private property defies the “ban”, then the county may not be able to directly act to shut it down or punish the organizers or participants, but suppose one of the attendees turns out to have been infected with COVID-19: everyone who got exposed at the event will then be able to argue in court that the organizers were negligent to ignore the county’s decree and should be held liable for damages resulting from that negligence.
Also, event insurance might pay out if the event is cancelled due to an order or request from the government, but not if the organizer just decided to cancel.
Most of Germany, and some other European countries, have banned large gatherings too. I don’t know how they’re planning to enforce it. But I suspect that gatherings “over 1000 people” are almost never someone’s private event, and are generally professionally organized. And certainly the government does in principle have authority to place limits on how people conduct business, e.g. with health inspections, rules about work conditions, and so on.
Freedom of assembly may not be as baked in in European countries as it is in the US (I have no idea).
In my country, it can be limited for reasons of public order, which is a concept that can be interpreted very broadly, including for reasons of health.
Basically, the government can do what the courts let them get away with, and they will surely be lenient if a pandemic threatens.
California’s constitution grants extremely robust powers to local government, so arguably yes.
The first and fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution take precedence over anything in the California constitution, so this would be a tough one to defend if someone really wanted to challenge it.
That was my thinking.
There’s two separate issues: does the county have the authority, generally. And would said actions be in violation of some scheme of rights (US/Federal Constitution, Federal civil rights laws, etc.)
I know little about California law, so I can’t answer any of those issues.
For Federal Constitutional interpretation, I suspect these actions would clear the bar for strict scrutiny.
The 3-pronged test includes:
1) It must be justified by a compelling governmental interest. Having citizens not die from disease would almost certainly qualify.
2) The law or policy must be narrowly tailored to achieve that goal or interest. Banning public gatherings of over 1000 people strikes me as incredibly-narrowly tailored.
3) The law or policy must be the least restrictive means for achieving that interest. Coming up with something which is less-restrictive would be challenging. About the only way would be if someone could mathematically prove that there was no decrease in the effectiveness if the ban cap was a different number. And that’s really hard to pull off.
Given that it’s long been accepted to have “time, place or manner” restrictions on other 1st Amendment activity, I can easily see this passing.
Would the (apparently arbitrary) number “1,000” pose issues? “Why not 500 or 5,000?” a judge might ask.
Any govt that has the conditional right to quarantine presumably would be able to restrict big gatherings conditionally, too.
When you say the county has “banned” such events, what precisely do you mean? Do you mean that the County Board of Supervisors approved an ordinance specifying legal punishments for organizers (or attendees?) of such events? Or is it just that the County Board of Supervisors issued a statement saying “we believe that no events of this size should take place within the county”?
An ordinance specifying legal punishments would likely be a violation of the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of peaceable assembly. But it’s not 100% obvious to me that it would be, given that many municipalities have things like curfews making it illegal for minors to be outside after 10 pm, and also given that cities and counties have the power to issue zoning code specifying the uses that both public and private spaces can be put to. The fire marshal regularly bans buildings from hosting more than particular specified numbers of people (and public businesses are usually legally required to post signs stating the fire marshal’s declaration of the capacity of the space).
But I suspect that most governments are merely issuing strong suggestions.
Many universities have “banned” their faculty members from travel, either to level 2 and 3 countries, or all international travel, or all out-of-state travel. Several friends of mine at other universities have asked exactly how this is enforced. My guess is that universities will just refuse to process reimbursements for such travel that takes place (I sincerely hope they will reimburse people who bought tickets for such travel and then choose not to go!) and will then count on their employees to largely obey the statement that was issued.
A lot of libertarians assume that all government decrees must be backed up with force, with escalation possible, up to and including death. But I think they underestimate the power of manifestly reasonable regulation that has zero enforcement power behind it.
I looked up the actual order just now, and it at least purports to direct the police to back up the order with force if necessary:
Here are the laws cited in that clause:
It definitely looks to me as if these orders are backed up with force and are authorized by California law. Whether or not those laws are constitutional under the present circumstances is another question, and one of which I’m not sure of the answer.
The powers granted to public health authorities are extremely broad. One of the sections cited in the Santa Clara order, Cal. Health & Safety Code § 101040, authorizes the health officer to “take any preventive measure that may be necessary to protect and preserve the public health from any public health hazard” during a declared emergency, which California is currently under. So there’s clear statutory authority for the order. Constitutionality is another matter. (Though most of the case law on public health dates back to the early 20th century, when elitist judges were all too ready to let modern scientific medicine override the uninformed desires of the unwashed masses. Nowadays? There are probably a few judges who would free Mary Mallon.)
There was another case during a measles outbreak last year, when the NYC health department ordered mandatory vaccination for everyone living in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Although I’m very much an anti-anti-vaxxer, this order didn’t sit well with me for some reason, but I’m fine with quarantine and isolation orders for the exposed and infected. This distinction is purely instinctual on my part, and I can’t offer any logical explanation for it. Legally, the health department is empowered to do both.
That sounds much more just than if they overrode the uninformed desires of the well-washed masses.
What constitutes a “gathering”? Would an office building with 1000 people in it be going against this ban? Apple’s headquarters normally holds something like 10,000 people, iirc. Even though they are telling people to work from home, I’d guess there will still be more than a 1,000 there.
From the order itself:
Meanwhile on the east coast, there’s a circle on a map. A few politicians have described in vague terms what is and isn’t allowed inside the circle, but solid details are scarce.
When I was a child I lived just outside that circle, and I spent a lot of time inside it. For sentimental reasons I’d like to know what’s going to happen there.
If @BBA is right that the county is acting under a state statute, I would bet large sums of money that this would be found to be constitutional if challenged. The state’s power to regulate health in an emergency is at the core of the state “police power.” My intuition (for what that may be worth) is that a 14th Amendment challenge would fail. (I need to get some sleep, or I would say more.) I would predict a unanimous opinion if it were decided in the US Supreme Court.
If you are interested, you might have a look at a website that will come up if you google “ncsi state quarantine and isolation statutes.” (I’m trying to avoid the automatic link censor.) There is also a very good podcast on the subject, which was posted March 10th. “Reasonable Disagreements” is the name of the podcast, “Coronavirus, the Constitution, and the CFPB” is the episode. The first part of the podcast is the relevant part. Richard Epstein is the one who is interviewed on the topic.
I thought I would check to see that this podcast comes up when I search for it on my iphone podcast app. It didn’t show. But if you google “Reasonable Disagreements podcast” and click through, it should be the first episode that you find there.
Also, by the time the issue works it way through the courts, I expect COVID-19 will either be a bad memory or a seasonal disease that’s widespread and that some knuckleheads are trying to convince you not to get your kids vaccinated against. I assume few judges will want to issue a temporary order overriding public health authorities during an epidemic, so I doubt this will ever actually make it to court.
They tried to challenge it with a class action lawsuit but couldn’t get enough plaintiffs together!
If I was a 1st amendment lawyer trying to establish good precedent… I would be wary of fighting a case where the government is trying to contain a plague because that’s one way to get a new exception carved out since they have a really really strong and demonstrable reasonable and good faith interest taking steps to contain the outbreak.
There’s already enough “Plagues and wars of extermination” exceptions in various legal and social norms around the globe.
The 1st amendment has no written “except imminent lawless action” clause but that got established through legal cases.
So in the interest of diverting myself from coronavirus conversations, I’ve been thinking for a while about the ways our web applications do and don’t serve us, and how they might have been different. I think the format of blogging we all know today isn’t going anywhere, but there are features uncommon to blogging software which might be common in a different world. Suppose that a blog were just a little more like a wiki, where folks could make edit suggestions to be incorporated, or suppose they could add review comments like on Google Docs. (This format would be great for one of Scott’s “More Than You Wanted to Know” or links posts, though it would be little use for the rest.) Likewise we could imagine publishing software that saved the full version control history of a post following publication; I’d love to see this for news sites that like to silently change their articles in response to criticism, so it would be easier to keep them honest. Finally, we could imagine a world where the curse that is WYSIWYG never existed, and people just used proper markup.
So suppose you get to mix and match features in tomorrow’s (or yesterday’s) software. What would you include? What would you exclude?
If you have a moderately high trust readership, I wouldn’t mind something like that thing Gab was trying to do where you had global comments for a URL. But just for one site. So one could mark up one of Scott’s essays with additional links, rebuttals, comments, etc. Then you could view them or not, or only view ones made by certain users, or markups with certain popularity ratings, etc.
If your website is populated by dicks, though, this is going to be entirely worthless.
Can you explain how Gab works? I checked Wikipedia but literally every section is about how full of racists the site is, including the one on design.
Gab itself is just twitter for witches. But they were developing (or still are, I don’t know…I heard about it once many months ago and forgot it until I read your post here) a browser extension that would enable comments on any URL. So they would be running some sort of cloud-thingy, and then if there’s, say, a story on CNN that you think is wrong and you want to link a rebuttal to, or post a comment about, you open up the Gab-enabled comment page and post your thoughts. This is indexed in the cloud-thingy with the URL you’re viewing. Then anyone else who comes along with the same browser extension can view your comments, or post back or whatever.
I think the idea was to counteract all the news websites that have disabled their comments sections, charitably because moderation is hard and uncharitably because TPTB don’t want anyone questioning The Narrative. I just think it’s a neat idea to have comments on every website that the site owner doesn’t have to moderate or be responsible for.
And three principled civil libertarians, presumably. But thanks. That sounds abstractly interesting, but with how awful comments sections genuinely are elsewhere, I can’t imagine that being anything but a shitshow. =/
Weren’t internet-wide annotations supposed to be the next big thing at some point? I could have sworn Chrome was working on something like that a while ago.
(*searches*)
Looks like there’s been lots of theoretical murmurs about it going back decades, and a few apps/extensions like a.nnotate, Diigo, and Genius are available for this purpose. Google’s extension was launched way back in 2009 and then discontinued… way back in 2011.
After watching Twitch I really wish someone would incorporate a live comment feed on all streaming services/media that I consume, that would also time stamp and run along side the thing you are watching, so I could watch Voyager S2E24 and commiserate with my fellow Trekkies in ‘real time’.
I think this is what already happens with Twitch videos, I believe people watching the video can comment and their comments get added, at that time stamp, into the chat feed for that video for anyone else who watches the video later.
Edit: To defend my apparent enjoyment of Twitch chat, to me it is analogous to being in a crowd for a sporting event. I am not having a ‘discussion’ with anyone else in the stadium, it is just nice to see everyone go wild when something crazy happens and I am also going wild, and it makes it easier for me to go more wild, some sort of emotional feedback loop. I am sure someone somewhere has eloquently explained how this is an important mechanism in riots or something.
@Spookykou
I agree, that would be neat. Also I enjoy your posting style and you seem like a fun person.
I hear there’s a thing where they do this for Buffy the Vampire Slayer alongside some retrospective podcast thing.
Holy shit, is this why Twitch chat exists?
I really don’t like going to sporting events and I also really don’t like Twitch chat. I’d never made the connection between these two dislikes before.
I watch live chess streams on Youtube sometimes and I enjoy reading the comments and occasionally commenting. The only downside is that about once an hour someone will bring up Bobby Fischer’s antisemitism or say that women chess players are bad at the game or something, which always derails the thread a while.
@Conrad Honcho Thanks, this kind of positive feedback is sure to keep me coming back.
I would get people to agree right now whether or not we wanted the internet to promote anonymous exchange of ideas OR if it was an extension of our existing identity past meatspace. Trying to develop a protocol that does both has just left both sides vulnerable to bad actors.
When I scrolled over this comment and saw the first few words and the OR, I immediately thought it was going to be about ad revenue vs. cheap subscription models keeping the Internet afloat. And it wasn’t, but now I’m wondering whether they’re not related. How much better does targeted advertising work when we’re always logged into stable identities linked to meatspace?
(Personally, as will surprise no one here, I prefer the anonymous exchange of ideas.)
Much, much better i’d imagine. It’s why Facebook is a multi-billion dollar company and Reddit, well, isn’t.
It’s also why, despite the fact that everyone really seems to disapprove of walled garden approach to expanding internet access in the third world, no one has been able to effectively mobilize against it.
ETA: I realize the hypocrisy of saying this while hiding behind a pseudonym, but I’m ambivalent on the concept. For a long time I used to publish content under my own name.
I’d like to see an easy system for writing a response on my blog to another blog, and have that other blog automatically link to my response as though it were a comment (allowing for moderation on their side). Maybe a WordPress plugin could create this?
WordPress has pingbacks, doesn’t it? https://en.support.wordpress.com/comments/pingbacks/
One of the stranger attributes of dreams is that they often feel quite ordinary from the inside. I often find myself in absurd or incoherent situations–living in “my” house when it bears no resemblance to anywhere I’ve ever lived, or needing to find a fork in order to escape from a giant evil tree, or whatnot. It’s not necessarily that the dream is even presenting me with unreasonable scenarios; sometimes, it is my method for resolving them that is obviously unreasonable. But within the dream, everything usually feels natural and coherent, just the way things are.
Is this a common experience?
Yes. In my dreams things make complete sense that are revealed as obvious nonsense as soon as I wake up. Many times I have had a brilliant idea in a dream. Then I wake up and struggle to remember the idea, and on the few occasions I can remember it I realize it is an incoherent idea. For instance, in a recent dream I was directing a Hollywood movie. As the movie progressed I thought multiple times that it was a really clever movie, and was sure to be a success. When I woke I tried to remember it and it was nonsensical non-story about Abraham Lincoln being brought back to life in the modern day, but also there are robots. That was it: just a wild premise with no plot attached. Yet at the time, in the dream, it seemed better than Citizen Kane.
So, it was a faithful adaptation of Phillip K Dick’s “We Can Build You”, then? I don’t see what’s so terrible about that.
I would watch this movie.
The best dream I ever had was spent watching a gritty, The Shining-esque horror reboot of Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. Couldn’t remember the details upon waking but boy was I ever entertained during the dream.
On another occasion I had a dream that I was watching a new Armando Iannucci program, and when I woke up I managed to remember one of the better jokes: a man uses L’Oreal Kids shampoo as oven cleaner, because, as he puts it, “it’s effective on anything except childrens’ eyeballs”. I still think it’s funny.
Then of course there is the story of Paul McCartney writing the melody to Yesterday in his sleep.
I too have had the experience of having a brilliant idea in a dream, only to wake up and realize it is complete nonsense.
As far as the OP’s question, I always assumed it was normal that your brain turns off the “nonsense filter” while dreaming.
One thing that happens to me a lot in dreams:
* “This thing only happens to me in dreams.”
* “It’s happening now.”
* My resulting thought process is either “wow, my dreams came true” or “my dreams prepared me for this, how lucky.” Never “of course this means you are in a dream now.”
I don’t recall having that but I’ve had the opposite-
Me: Look, X is happening!
Dad (smiling): What does that tell you?
Me (surprised): We’re in a dream?
Dad (smiling broadly): Riiiight!
On waking I vividly recalled the shock of realization, and the eerie feeling that at that time part of me (the part running the Dad character) already knew.
I don’t recall having that but I’ve had the opposite-
Me: Look, X is happening!
Dad (smiling): What does that tell you?
Me (surprised): We’re in a dream?
Dad (smiling broadly): Riiiight!
On waking I vividly recalled the shock of realization, and the eerie feeling that at that time part of me (the part running the Dad character) already knew.
I’ve had similar things happen in my dreams a couple times, but always just before I woke up.
I’ve never known it was a dream that I can recall, but I’ve sometimes known it was something else – a story (even as it seemed real-ish, I had some ability to direct it) or a video game (ditto). I once got out of a nightmare by finding a board (like the kind of informational thing you get in parks) that had the options menu for the video game, and telling it to transfer me to another zone. The zone didn’t exist yet – it wasn’t a very finished video game – so I woke up.
I think this is quite a common experience.
I’ve wondered sometimes whether pre-civilization dreams were more coherent because of, well, fewer random things to throw in a blender. There were no forks or modern houses to compose your dreams back then, after all. But I suppose dreams could be bizarre in realms that are arbitrarily complex, like social relations (your chieftain is also your brother and your wife’s sister’s kin are now living in your hut and … ), so maybe there’s nothing to it.
When I dream, I usually have a feeling of wrongness, that something about the world is messed up and not functioning properly. A common motif in my dreams is the process of, “I think I need the fork to defeat the evil tree -> vague feeling that something is wrong about that but still trying it anyway -> get the fork -> fork fails to stop the evil tree and now I’m screwed”. I usually wake up at that point.
My dreams also get more vivid when I’m deep in the process of writing or revising a novel.
Your and Joseph’s gravatars are eerily similar.
When I made my email, I had to add a “1” to the end of it, as someone already had the username I wanted. Maybe he’s the person who beat me to it?
> Is this a common experience?
It’s at least common enough for Inception to make reference to it. When Cobb is running the Mr. Charles ploy on the target guy, part of that involves drawing the target’s attention to the strangeness of the dream (the shifting gravity, shaking, etc) to make him aware that’s he’s in a dream.
I remember getting pretty excited at the time that someone else was making reference to this experience I had had. I guess the standard topics of discussion don’t quite lend themselves well to people bringing this up in conversations otherwise?
Yup. All the time. Except in my dreams it’s also often really hard to see.
I take it you’re familiar with The Hero With a Thousand Faces? The focus is on mythology, which might not be the type of fiction you’re after, but I understand the book’s general thesis applies well to more contemporary work.
Looks like the John Hopkins arcgis dashboard got enough traffic to be noticed by the powers that be, Iran is now listed as Iran (Islamic Republic Of), Palestine as occupied Palestinian territory, HK and Macao as SARs, Vatican is “The holy see” and best of all – “Taipei and environs”
I don’t remember where I read this and I can’t find it now, but IIRC there’s some US law that states that “foreign country” means “foreign country or Taiwan”.
One China, ‘two’ airlines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Asia_Airways
It’s the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, passed immediately after the termination of diplomatic recognition of the Republic of China:
If I were in charge of that board and got complaints to that effect my response would immediately be “fuck you I’m not changing it.” screw that dumb and confusing PC bullshit.
And that’s how you’d stop being in charge of that board.
Then you never really were.
You can stop being in charge in a number of different ways that I don’t think invalidate the common sense meaning of being in charge of something. First I don’t think you need to be the ultimate owner and final arbiter of something to simply be in charge of it.* Second, in charge of can also mean you are responsible for, again allowing room for someone to remove you from something you are in charge of, especially if you display that you are not actually being responsible. Finally, you can still be in charge while not really in charge, like a kid who is king of the mountain because no other kids want to play with them anymore. **
*I think this covers the vast majority of times when an English speaker uses the phrase ‘in charge’.
**I only now appreciate the possibility that your comment might have been jocular in intent, sunk cost prevents me from deleting my comment though!
“If you think titling matters more than the information being presented, you can do it.”
Johns Hopkins is in the business of sending scholars, diplomats, and advisers to all corners of the world, including the ones without our deep and abiding respect for civil liberties and our abhorrence of collective punishment. The people so engaged – and I’ve been one of them, and some of my friends still are – may not appreciate your delivering a gratuitous “Fuck You” to the Middle Kingdom and most of the Middle East in the name of their institution, just to signal your personal virtue.
And now HK, Macao and Taiwan are all counted together under “China”
The official position of the government sitting in Taipei does agree with that.
Isn’t this just wrong?
IIRC the Vatican is the entity that controls the territory of the Vatican City State but doesn’t conduct foreign diplomacy, while the Holy See conducts foreign diplomacy on behalf of the Church but doesn’t have any territory of its own.
Hey does anyone speak Dutch? I’m looking at you Aapje; partly because your name looks like a Dutch diminutive, and partly because I know you speak Dutch anyway. I just went through a unit on Duolingo where I was soundly drilled that “zijn” was not used for locations; that if something “is” in a place, in Dutch it has to instead “sit” there, or “lie” there, or “stand” there. Then in the next unit, I get this:
Doesn’t this construction contradict what I just learned? Is this good Dutch? Have I been classically Duolingo’d like an idiot? Does my only hope to understand what is going on when I visit Ghent in the summer lie in getting a Dutch mistress and talking to her a lot? Please advise!
Bonus fact: according to the teaching material which I now fear to trust, in Dutch a box is standing on the floor if it was placed intentionally, but lying on the floor if it fell there, so in order to communicate the position of a box, you need to know its history!
Germanic languages sometimes have different constructions for generic locations vs named cities/countries.
(German has a bunch of differnt forms of ‘I’m going to’ depending on what sort of thing the destination is.)
The box thing makes perfect sense: picture a chair standing on the floor. Now picture a chair lying on the floor.
I always thought it was weird that in English (or American), a box would “sit” on my desk. Sitting is to me very much an anatomical thing, much more so than standing or lying.
“The box is atop your desk.”
I was born and raised Dutch.
I am curious to hear your a priori intuitions. I feel they should probably offer fine guidance, but I’m biased of course.
1. “Het restaurant en het huis zijn bij het strand” strikes me as a slightly unnatural uttering, but this may be because I hardly ever discuss houses or restaurants near beaches. I’m not sure I would have noticed any unnaturalness, had I not been asked for my opinion. It’s fine 🙂
2. That ‘zijn’ is not used for locations is simply false (it may be somewhat useful as an approximation, but I’m unsure as to what extent). People indeed commonly say stuff like “ik ben nu in Haarlem” or “de wedstrijd is in Eindhoven”. People also say “ik zit nu in Haarlem” (which communicates to me a bit more staticness — this person is not zipping through the city in a train) and “de wedstrijd vindt plaats in Eindhoven” (which would, I guess, be considered more ‘correct’, but being much more wordy it is used primarily in more formal contexts).
3. In Ghent people speak Flemish, which differs from ‘Dutch Dutch’ in, undoubtedly among others, choice of words and even sentence structure. You might prefer your mistress to be Flemish. Either way you should be fine though. I think.
(Difficulty with understanding Flemish varies along a north-south gradient across the Netherlands. Sometimes on Dutch tv Flemish people are accompanied by subtitles, which I assume are enjoyed mostly by those ‘above the rivers’.)
4. I contend is it intuitively obvious wether a box is ‘standing’ or lying. No need to consider the history: if it’s on its side, it is ‘lying’; if it is upright it’s ‘standing’ (although you can get away with saying it is ‘lying’ if it is empty, I guess).
This is fun 🙂
Also, first post. Hello, everyone o/
Hello, and with interesting + thoughtful comments like that, you’re very welcome
@Secretly French
‘Zijn’ can be used in multiple ways.
1a: wij zijn dronken = we are drunk
1b: wij zijn in de kroeg = we are in the bar
Here ‘zijn’ denotes the state of a group.
2a: zijn auto = his car
2b: zijn huis = his house
Here ‘zijn’ denotes that something is (co-)owned by or (co-)belongs to a man. ‘Haar’ is used for women (haar auto = her car). A bit confusingly, denoting ownership by a group doesn’t use ‘zijn,’ but ‘hun’ (hun auto = their car).
3: aan het lopen zijn = walking around (literally: at the walking are)
This is really a variant of 1, but with the order changed. This is used in sentences like:
– Als we aan het lopen zijn, dan… = if we are walking, then…
– De mannen die aan het lopen zijn, zijn moe. = The men that are walking, are tired.
—
Your sentence is just variant 1. ‘The restaurant and the house’ are a group of things that ‘are/exist’ ‘near the beach.’ The sentence is perfectly correct Dutch, mainly to be used for giving directions.
I’m not really sure what Duolingo meant when they said that ‘zijn’ is not for locations, but I hope that the above makes it more clear how you can use the word. Note that this part of Dutch is moderately hard and even second generation migrants often have a lot of trouble with it, as well as some natives.
As a bonus, a combination of 1 and 2: bang zijn voor zijn eigen schaduw = being afraid of his own shadow (literally: afraid being of his own shadow)
It’s more the other way around, you can choose to convey certain information by how you phrase things and you can convey certain knowledge or the lack of it by how you do so.
I would personally use ‘lying’ (liggen) primarily for things that are placed lengthwise on the floor and standing (staan) for things that are upright. Due to physics, things that fall tend to lie, rather than stand.
When you drop something on the floor and it happens to somehow stand upright, then saying that it stands on the floor invites confusion, as this implies that it was placed, rather than that it fell. So you would typically have to choose between using ‘lying’ if the fact that the item ended up in a peculiar position is not relevant or be more explicit if it does matter.
However, isn’t this the very same issue that you have in English?
PS. In Ghent they speak Flemish, which has sayings and accents/dialects that can be hard for Dutch people to understand. Flemish TV series that are shown on Dutch TV are often subtitled, just like some Dutch shows are subtitled on Flemish TV channels. So a local mistress might be a good idea (for multiple reasons).
> However, isn’t this the very same issue that you have in English?
To some extent yes. The main difference is that we can just say “it is on the floor” in any situation, regardless of position or whether it was placed or fell.
Ha! We would never say a box stands on the floor! We would say it is on the floor. It doesn’t stand or sit or lie down! Okay in rare cases you might say something is sitting on the floor (or some other surface), but very rare.
Funny enough, when I mentioned this difference in the languages to a Flemish guy, he also seemed a bit surprised, like this had not occurred to him before (not a fluent English speaker, but business professional skill).
“wij zijn in de kroeg”- why not “wij zitten in de kroeg”? Why not “Het restaurant en het huis standen bij het strand.”? Because plurals? Or it can be either?
We have a whole word to talk about something you put down, “lay”. I think he’s right that this issue does come up, but it’s also true that you can always just use “on”.
@Cliff
Fair enough. However, you could say that a chair is standing or lying on the floor, depending on whether it is upright or not.
So the principle is valid, right? Although English is a bit more strict/limited.
Both are perfectly fine. The latter implies that you are actually sitting, but it’s not uncommon to stand in a bar, so if some or all of the group are standing, the first option would be more correct.
The general rule is that you can always just use ‘zijn’ (or ‘ben’/’bent’/’is’ for singular) to indicate where a person is or people are, unless it would be weird not to have a specific position. For example, while “we’re in bed” is correct English, you wouldn’t say “wij zijn in bed”. You would use: “we liggen in bed” = we’re lying in bed.
The multiple of ‘staat’ (stand) is ‘staan’ (standing), not ‘standen*.’ It’s perfectly correct to say: “Het restaurant en het huis staan bij het strand” = the restaurant and the house are standing near the beach.
Basically, in Dutch some things can stand near or on other things (like cars), some things can lie near other things (like beaches) and a lot of things can either stand or lie near other things (like buildings).
The result is that some groupings don’t work, for example, you can’t say that the car and the beach are standing or lying near the restaurant. In English you could say (but you probably wouldn’t) that “the car and the beach are near the restaurant,” but you can’t say in Dutch that “de auto en het strand zijn bij het restaurant.”
* ‘Standen’ does exist, but it is the multiple of ‘stand,’ meaning level, position, class or score. So you can say “de waterstanden zijn op recordniveau door de apocalyptische regen” = the water levels are at record level because of the apocalyptic rain.
Is this a typo? “Het restaurant en het huis
standen[staan / stonden] bij het strand”“Wij [zijn / zitten] in de kroeg” both are valid (and common), as is “het restaurant en het huis [staan / stonden] bij het strand”.
staan: infinitive + plural of ‘to stand’ (“we staan” = “we’re standing”)
stonden: plural past of ‘to stand’ (“we stonden” = lit. “we stood”, but in practice “we were standing” because English is weird.)
standen: plural of ‘stand’, which has many meanings: posture, standing, (game) score, configuration/setting, among others.
I’d say a shoebox on the floor with its longest axis in the vertical was ‘stood on the floor’.
Never thought about it, but German has the same double meaning for “sein” (obivious from the same source as “zijn”) it can mean both “his” or “be”.
In Dutch it’s also “are”. “Zijn kleren zijn rood” = “His clothes are red” = “Seine Kleider sind rot”
It’s not so common to have both meanings of “sein” in one sentence, like in “Sein Haar kann rot sein” = “Zijn haar kan rood zijn” = “His hair can be red”.
In Dutch you also have “Haar haar” = “her hair”.
German here, learning Dutch on Duolingo, too. (Figuring it’d be the lowest-hanging fruit)
It seems like the Dutch use zitten more than the Germans. The sentence from Duolingo: “Volgens mij zitten er weinig aardbeien in je aardbeiensap” would not make sense in German because strawberries do not have any bottoms to sit upon in the strawberry juice. And for “the clothes are in the closet”, the translation “De kleren zijn in de kast” would be marked WRONG because it has to be “De kleren zitten in de kast”.
Other than that, it is refreshingly easy. Some traps are the ordering of auxiliary verbs in subordinate phrases: “Ik wil Nederlands kunnen spreken” would be in German “Ich will Niederländisch sprechen können”, but Loiza Lamers gets this wrong too, and it’S not a big deal; and fun constructions like “ik sta te praten”.
I don’t think clothes ‘sit’ (zitten) in closets. Instead they lie (liggen). If there’s shoes in a closet, they probably ‘stand’ (staan).
There is actually some sitting in closets in Dutch — this is done by those who haven’t come out (as gay) yet.
@Robin
No, it would normally be: “De kleren hangen in de kast” = The clothes hang in the closet. Unless you are a messy person, in which case the clothes could lie in the closet. As Gelaarsd Schaap notes, shoes similarly stand in the closet, unless you just tossed them in there and they are not neatly standing on their soles, in which case saying that they are lying in the closet is better.
You can say: “De kleren zitten in de koffer” = The clothes are in the suitcase.
In general, you can use ‘zitten in’ for things that are contained within something, but as I noted earlier, only when there isn’t a more specific verb that is much more appropriate.
The Dutch are relatively sloppy. Language competitions are typically won by Flemish contestants.
You can do it with walking too: “we lopen/liepen te praten” = we are/were talking while walking.
However, you can’t do it with cycling, so this is incorrect: “we fietsten te praten,” so then you have to say something like: “we waren aan het praten tijdens het fietsen,” which is basically the same as the English construct that you’d use in all cases.
@Gelaarsd @Aapje
Sorry, I might have remembered that wrong about clothes sitting in the closet. In the forum I only find “Hij stopt zijn kleren in de kast”, which is funny in German because “stopfen” means to cram the clothes into the closet so they would get all wrinkly.
I guess I have mixed it up with vegetables sitting in a basket (“De groente zit in de mand”), which you would not say in German either.
Also, I didn’t mean to disesteem Loiza Lamers, I like her and wish her the best for Let’s Dance, I just noticed her using the Dutch auxiliary verb ordering in German.
Of course, Dutch people speak very good English on average, much better than Germans, probably because movies tend to be subtitled instead of dubbed.
With regards to Dutch people speaking very good English:
1. A Norwegian couple I encountered on Sardinia during vacation came up with the same subtitles hypothesis. According to them, countries that went with subtitles instead of dubbing (among them the Netherlands and Norway) do far better at speaking other languages. I have not checked this.
2. The Dutch travel a lot. They’re everywhere, and regularly recognize each other on sight. (Above mentioned Norwegian couple noted that they recognize fellow Norwegians as well, so this may be quite normal.) Learning to make yourself understood in the local tongue is considered quite normal.
3. In high school it is mandatory (at least in the ‘upper segment’, i.e. havo-vwo — I don’t know about vmbo) to learn at least one ‘modern foreign language’ other than English (which is already mandatory on its own). Most common are German and French.
4. I have heard it said that the Dutch speak fine German as well. I am not one of them. Not so for French, that I know of.
5. Maybe it’s just me or my environment, but there appears to me to be a high standard regarding English fluency over here. I for one am uncomfortable with my English pronunciation and not quite happy with my speed of English writing. As for the quality of my written English, you be the judge. What does it mean when one can have a laugh about, for example, Mark Rutte’s (Dutch prime minister) distinctly Dutch accent, with Rutte’s English otherwise being excellent? (I do not have a problem with Rutte’s — or anyone’s — accent.)
PS: Gelaarsde Kat = Puss in Boots. A schaap is a sheep.
German ability seems to be declining rather rapidly among the Dutch, due to various factors (including, ironically enough, globalization, which is extremely English in nature).
I hear you can understand Germans if they talk very slowly, but they can’t understand you!
I can imagine that foreign languages other than English are declining in Germany too, but I cannot find any good sources that quickly. I only see that there are passages of Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” written in French, and recent editions add a translation in the appendix, where older ones do not.
I can imagine that Dutch don’t like learning German, and when I’m there I don’t like speaking “slow German” and hoping to be understood, as @Cliff says. It feels wrong to me. I’m told that many people would refuse to understand it, for historical reasons.
It’s hard to generalize from André Rieu and Rudi Carrell to everybody, but they speak flawlessly, unless they cultivate a trademark accent on purpose. I guess German is almost as easy to learn for Dutch as vice versa.
But what I’d really like to know: Do people in the Netherlands know (or care) that some of their words appear funny or cute to Germans? E.g. “deeltjesversneller” for particle accelerator (because “verschnellern” is a rather cute way of saying “beschleunigen”), or “hoeveelheid” for amount (literally: “how-many-ness”)? I assume such words are totally normal for you.
At a tangent, this practice is annoying for those of us who read old translations. I was reading the Garnett translation of Anna Karenina a few weeks ago, and there was untranslated French and German in the story. English, too, though for obvious reasons that was not a problem.
I kept asking a friend fluent in French for help with the idioms, but funnily enough, he wasn’t familiar with a lot of them, as they’re archaic.
@Robin
My grandparents do indeed have a distaste for hearing German. Bad memories. I have not noticed any such discomfort in my parents, nor have I in, say, classmates. Overall I very rarely observe hard feelings.
I remember conversations between my parents and Germans on campings. These would indeed be held in English, but it seems to me the Germans felt more strongly about the issue than my parents. I would not have minded either way either, had I known German.
Another reason to choose a mutual second language is to provide more of a level playing field.
Know? Had I been prompted I should have guessed…
Care? I’m not sure what that should entail. Perhaps this means I don’t.
How is verschnellern cute? How should I read beschleunigen (etymological considerations, relations to other words..?)
If there is anything odd about deeltjesversneller to me, it is the deeltjes- part. It seems to me there should have been a dedicated word for these entities, but instead we have a very ordinary diminutive of ‘part’. Versnellen, on the other had, is completely normal, as you say.
@Aapje on German ability- a Dutch friend (with university-aged children) says that he is much better at German than his children even though they had more hours of German classes at school than he did. He thinks it’s because when he was growing up often the only TV channel showing children’s programs was a German one, but his kids had more channels so had access to Dutch children’s programs whenever they were allowed to choose what was on TV.
@Robin on words sounding amusing- I’ve heard Dutch speakers say similar things about Afrikaans words like langnekkameel (long-neck-camel, giraffe) or moltrein (mole-train, metro/subway).
@Cliff
A bunch of studies found that German is easier to understand for Dutch people than vice versa, but this was often attributed to greater experience with German by Dutch people. However, a study that tried to control for this by using children with no familiarity of the other language, found that Dutch children performed better at recognizing German cognates than vice versa.
I’ve also seen claims that the Dutch slur their words a lot more, making them hard to understand; and that the Dutch language has way more fixed expressions. The meaning of fixed expressions is relatively hard to guess. For example, an English fixed expression is “pop the question,” where the meaning is pretty much impossible to guess.
The Dutch “in je nopjes zijn” = “being in your protrusions” means being very happy or content, but it can’t even be parsed by modern Dutch people. It refers to the presence of protrusions on new clothing produced with old fashioned manufacturing techniques, which would wear off over time. People would wear new clothes for parties, weddings and other happy occasions, so ‘being in’ clothing with such protrusions correlated with being happy and causing the fixed expression to make sense at the time. Obviously, this is impossible to modern people to understand, even if you know the Dutch words for happy or content and this expression simply has to be learned.
In contrast, Germans seem to simply say that they are/someone is happy/content in all cases.
Some other common fixed expressions:
“met je neus in the boter vallen” = falling with your nose into the butter = being lucky
“uit je nek kletsen” = talking out of your neck = talking nonsense
“je ei kwijt kunnen” = being able to get rid of your egg = being able to express your frustrations
“iets onder de knie hebben” = having something below the knee = having mastered something
“iets zien zitten” = seeing something sitting = being confident in your ability to handle/do something
“het gaat me niet in de koude kleren zitten” = it doesn’t end up in my cold clothes = it affects me emotionally quite strongly
“nergens op slaan” = hitting nothing = hogwash
“dat is gesneden koek” = it is cut cake = it is a piece of cake
@Robin
‘Deeltjesversneller’ nor ‘hoeveelheid’ are funny or cute to us. They are just words.
Unlike Gelaarsd Schaap, I think that ‘deeltje’, which can mean fragment or particle, is perfectly suitable. You are accellerating fragments/particles, so the word describes what happens.
BTW, I see no significant dislike for Germans for historic reasons. I think that (in general) there is more antagonism against Belgians than Germans (but both are not very significant).
@AlphaGamma
In the past, people would get the TV signal with an antenna, which meant that part of the Netherlands could watch German TV next to the Dutch channels. Back then, there was far less choice in Dutch TV channels and the Internet didn’t exist. Nowadays, this completely changed and Dutch kids are way more likely to watch English speaking Youtubers or such, than anything German.
And Afrikaans is really amusing, because complex Dutch words are often heavily simplified in a very literal way. The double negations that are still a negation also sounds really funny, like speakers of Afrikaans can’t make up their mind. For example:
“Hy kan nie Afrikaans praat nie” = He can not Afrikaans speak not = he can’t speak Afrikaans
IDK about Netherlandic, but translating German technical language in my head always makes me feel like I’m reading Uncleftish Beholding.
By the way, I love the Dutch word for microwave – magnetron – now that actually sounds like a particle accelerator. I wonder if Dutch is the only language not to use the Micro+”word for wave” format. I think they invented the device.
About deeltjesversneller, hard to say what’s so funny.
1. Yes, the “tje” diminuitive is cute, perhaps because it reminds of Frau Antje from the cheese advertisements, or the child star Heintje? But “Teilchen” is diminuitive too, as is particle (particle is to part as cubicle to cube).
2. “Verschnellern” is somewhat clumsy or child-language for “beschleunigen”, for no particular reason, since “schleunig” is also a (rather archaic) word for “fast”. As if in English it was “particle quickener”.
3. Perhaps it’s as they said in the film “Train of life”: German is like Yiddish without the humour. Thus German is a local minimum of humour, and compared to it, every neighbouring language (including German dialects) is funny. Many comedians make a living with this.
Thanks @Aapje for all the fixed expressions! I love them, and not a single one translates directly to German, although we have quite a bunch of those, too. But if they are really that common, it somewhat humbles my Dutch-learning aspirations.
@Lambert: In WW1, there was an effort to replace some French loanwords by German equivalents. This gave us words like “Bürgersteig” (citizen’s rise) instead of “Trottoir” (sidewalk). The nazis wanted to drive this even further, but “Zerknalltreibling” for “motor” luckily didn’t catch on.
@AppetSci
The actual magnetron, a high-powered vacuum tube that generates microwaves, was invented by a German. It actually was the microwave generator in early microwave ovens. The microwave oven was invented by Raytheon.
The Flemish do say ‘microgolf,’ the literal translation of microwave.
Related to my talk of Tolkien linguistics elsethread:
The name Frodo in Lord of the Rings is taken from a legendary king of Zealand mentioned by Snorri Sturluson, Grottasöngr, etc. Frodo/Frōda/Fróði invited Fjölnir of Sweden over for dinner, where he drowned in the booze.
I’m not sure if that’s the most hobbity thing ever, or the most dwarven.
Frodi, meaning wise. I forget what the Westron is.
I’l never understand why they named such a mountainous country as New Zealand after somewhere as bepoldered as Zeeland. There’s nothing quite like arriving in Terneuzen* and going up hill to the sea.
*Hometown of the Flying Dutchman
As a quick click of the link in his comment taught me, Zealand is the largest island in Denmark and a much better fit for New Zeeland than Zeeland is.
Abel Tasman was Dutch.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/european-discovery-of-new-zealand/page-3
New Zealand was originally named Staten Land by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, in 1642. This was named after a political assembly called the Staten-Generaal, which originally helped centralize rule under Burgundian rule (the first session was in 1464). Each province in the low countries (including part of France at that time) had a parliament and having representatives of the provinces meet up regularly, forming the Staten-Generaal, allowed Duke Philip to govern the provinces more effectively.
Then after the liberation of part of the low countries from Spanish rule, the Staten-Generaal ruled the north of the Netherlands. The discovery of New Zealand by Tasman was near the end of the Dutch War of Independence (1566-1648), so it was presumably a patriotic choice.
However, it seems that Dutch cartographers didn’t like the name and chose Nova Zeelandia (New Zeeland translated Latin). I’m not sure how much they actually knew about what New Zealand looked like, because Tasman didn’t stick around after getting into a fight with the Māori, where four crew members were killed. Tasman called the bay where the killings happened ‘Murderer’s bay’ (now called Golden Bay)
During this period, many Dutch explorers thought that the land masses they found in the south were part of a great continent they called Terra Australis. The idea was that land masses had to balance out, so given the amount of land in the Northern hemisphere, there needed to be a very large continent in the Sourthern Hemisphere.
In 1615, an island off the coast of Argentina was also called Staten Land (and it is still called that, but now in Spanish: Isla de los Estados). Tasman wrote a letter where he said that “it is possible that this land [= New Zealand] joins to the Staten Land [= Isla de los Estados] but it is uncertain.” Apparently, he was certain enough to call them by the same name.
—
Anyway, New Zealand was left alone for quite a while after Tasman found it. James Cook was the second European explorer to visit it and he mapped almost the entire coastline in 1769. He anglicized the name from the Dutch maps, Nova Zeelandia, turning it into New Zealand.
PS. Staten Island in New York City is also named after the Staten-Generaal, so there were actually at least three islands named this way, each by a different explorer.
PS2. Dutch congress is now also called the Staten-Generaal, but the modern entity is bicameral, where one chamber is directly elected and the other indirectly, by the provinces.
> I’m not sure how much they actually knew about what New Zealand looked like
They landed in Golden Bay.
There’s 1200m high mountains within 10km of the coast there. That’s more than three Vaalserbergs tall.
IDK what the highest point in the OG Zeeland is, but I did find this: https://www.skiresort.info/ski-resorts/zeeland/sorted/mountain-altitude/
According to Peakbagger it is a 54m sand dune in Groot-Valkenisse.
@Lambert
These early explorers seemed to have merely mapped the coast lines, not mountains. So map makers who based their maps on their work would have no clue what the elevation of the land was like.
For example, here is the map from Tasman’s journey, where New Zealand is identified in ye olde Dutch as Staete Landt (= Staten Land). I see one small land feature in the middle, close to shore, but the rest is just the coast line, with a dotted line showing where the ship sailed.
Here is a 1726 map. On the bottom right you can see part of New Zealand, now being both referred to both as New Zeeland and Staaten land. Again, no mountains or other elevation.
Finally, here is an English map from 1744 by an English cartographer who was the Royal Cartographer to both the English and French king. Again, we see New Zealand at the bottom right without any elevation. This cartographer liked to write stories on his maps, so we have this statement (as part of a bigger story):
It is impossible to conceive a country that promises fairer from its situation, than this of Terra Australis; no longer incognita as this map demonstrates, but the southern continent discovered.
OK, boomer.
If we’re on place names, we also need to talk about New South Wales which is weird on two fronts. One, it really looks nothing like Wales. Two, why specify South Wales?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df-uemc-e3w
Frodi, meaning wise. I forget what the Westron is.
Maura Labingi. And I knew that without having to look it up.
I don’t know whether I should hold my head high with pride or hang it in shame 🙂
I’m reading “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk. His model of the brain — executive (frontal lobe), limbic (mid-brain), and reptilian (brain stem) — seems pretty useful when it comes to explaining traumatic experience and PTSD.
Maybe a simple way to put it would be that the lower parts hijack (adaptively) the executive brain when a person experiences a traumatic event. PTSD results when the executive brain can’t regain it’s normal role in regulating function.
But I wonder if this model can make sense of something like anxiety. Let’s say a person gets a phone call informing them of something really bad that is likely — but not certain — to happen in the near future. The person experiences devastating anxiety that won’t go away.
It seems like the fact that this message was delivered via language, which is a higher-brain function, and involves something in the future, which hasn’t happened and may never happen, rule out the sort of reptilian or limbic “hijacking” Van Der Kolk is describing. In fact, in this model, it looks like the opposite is happening: the executive brain is hijacking the other parts.
I’m curious if anyone has seen writings on this subject which try to explain anxiety using a model like Van Der Kolk’s? I’d be interested in checking that out.
Well, well out of my areas of expertise, but I think if you try to treat the brain as having unidirectional causal arrows, you’re probably going to be missing stuff. Feedback loops, or maybe feedback spirals, seem to be more descriptive.
@AL
Emotions are limbic and yet they can be triggered by language (just like language can increase your heartbeat). I think that it is a mistake to regard the brain as separate parts that act individually and in particular to threat the lower and higher level functions as separate, rather than an interconnected system.
A pilot flying over the oceans looks at a complex display and infers that the plane is going to run out of fuel before he can possibly get to land. There’s a highly intellectual process going on to understand the situation, but he’s surely going to have some intense emotional and physical reactions to the result of this reasoning process. Similarly for a doctor who looks at his own imaging and test results and realizes he’s got pancreatic cancer–it took years for him to acquire the knowledge to make any sense of the results, most people wouldn’t understand it, interpreting the results involves heavy use of his intellectual faculties, but that doesn’t prevent him having an emotional response to his own impending demise.
Star Trek fans:
Why is it that the military are also the “explorers”? I’ve seen most of OG and TNG and Voyager, but no answer has ever emerged for me.
This seems like a novel setup based on Earth history.
AFAIK, it’s the other way around: Starfleet is supposed to be an organization of scientists, diplomats, and explorers; but they keep getting shot at, so they had to shoehorn in military training, somehow. This is why Federation starships are so (comparatively) unsuited to combat for the majority of the series. In fact, it took not one but two consecutive existential threats for the Federation to finally develop dedicated Defiant-class warships (though you might not know about them if you haven’t seen DS9, which you should). It’s also why the Federation has little to no ground combat expertise.
Tasha Yar said that Star Fleet combat training was unmatched, and this tends to be true in the series where there are several instances of a human fighting one on one with a physically superior often militaristic alien and still winning, and significantly, nobody is ever really surprised by this.
Close combat and hand to hand training is not a bad idea for an explorer who visits posibly hostile places.
Having idividuals prepared for hand to hand combat, does not make your crews an effective land force, where stuff like unit tactics and combined arms are paramount.
Their unit tactics are also fine, every implication is that they beat or matched the Cardassians on basically every front for a while until they agreed to talk peace. Also in the DS9 episode with the crashed Jem Hadar ship they effectively engage in small unit combat with long arms while out numbered, and Jem Hadar are presented as one of the best trained most physically superior alien armed force in Star Trek. If you are talking about some sort of combined arms ww2 style battle with tanks and supply lines and planes, it is not at all clear to me that ground combat looks like that in a world with transporter tech, and orbital supremacy taking the places of air supremacy. I think this is reinforced by there not being any tanks and the only people with fighter jets that are not actually just their space ships are always low tech societies. I think the show did not give a definitive answer as to the Federations ground game, but what implications I can remember are positive. Janeway was part of an ‘away team’ that held a federation colony for weeks against a Cardassian ground assault!
As others said, the Starfleet is modelled after the British Navy in the Age of Sail. Wish famously did train there sailors for hand to hand combat in a way no one else did. So their crews were probably able to fend off, crew’s from other nations, and maybe even forces of some local non-european powers (espacially with support of the ship guns). But would struggle with regular army formations.
It’s some time since I watched DS9 but IIRC they described Federation forces beeing overrun by Cardassian and Jem’Hardar in the background.
Jem Hadar beat the federation in a lot of conflicts but it mostly sounded like a war fought in space. The Cardassians had victories but it always felt like they achieved this by attacking non-military targets. Which is kind of reinforced by all the episodes where they deal with someone who really super hates the Cardassians because they attacked the civilian station where their family was, or similar.
So they say. But they also say that they’ve evolved beyond the need for money, but they still play poker and not for matchsticks. Starfleet is a navy that explores when it isn’t fighting, and tailors its propaganda for a liberal-ish audience. Not coincidentally, Starfleet is the creation of a guy who served in the Pacific theater during World War Two and then wound up working in Hollywood.
Wait I always assumed the chips they used for poker had no monetary value and just facilitated the rules/customs of the game?
Edit: For example as a child I played poker with plastic chips my dad got for us, we each got the same number at the start and the goal was just to have more by the end, no money was changing hands.
If you’re playing just for fun and/or status, the rules may be the same but the tactics are different because “losing gloriously big” and “slinking away from the table after a marginal defeat” both cost the same. TNG was showing a fantasy version of high-stakes play.
Or, cynically, showing everyone else taking a dive and pretending that Riker was a badass high-stakes poker player because nobody wants to leave the XO in a bad mood. I mean, one of the other players was a telepath, one a card-counting supercomputer, one had X-ray vision, and even pre-beard Riker still bluffed his way to victory every time?
To be fair, Troi’s telepathy proved useless is much more high stakes situations than that.
It’s interesting to wonder if they insisted Data handicap himself (like the time Riker suggests he turn off his “internal chronometer” to test the phrase “a watched pot never boils”). Probably not, because the writers probably assume that there’s enough of an intuitive/emotional component to the game for the humans to have their own advantages.
@John Schilling
Data has less of an advantage here. You can’t card count in poker, because the deck is shuffled every hand. That’s a blackjack thing, because your odds change as hands are progressively dealt from the deck until the shoe is exhausted.
IIRC, the TNG crew played 5-card draw. I know a little bit about Texas Hold’em, and less about draw poker, but I believe that draw is a lot more heavily luck-based than Hold’em, because you get no other information than your cards and how many cards the other players have. In Hold’em (or other games with community or face-up cards like stud poker), you can work out what hands are impossible for other players to have–you can tell, for example if a flush is even possible. This makes community card games much more skill based.
Now, Data could be expected to always execute perfect play because of his perfect memory, but I don’t know if that can be converted to winning as reliably in draw poker as it would in Hold’em. As far as Riker goes, poker is still gambling. You can play really, really stupid and still win individual hands, it’s just that you’ll lose money over the long term to somebody who always makes the positive expected value plays.
I know for sure Worf won at least one game.
I can see where you are coming from in terms of tactics, but I can also see Starfleet/federation people in particular being very good at/insisting on ‘authentic’ play. For example a lot of D&D groups discourage ‘optimal’ play in favor of a game feel that most of the table(or the DM) is trying to go for, and while D&D players are not exactly bog-standard Americans, I would expect federation citizens to be even better at this kind of cooperative informal rules, thing. If everyone at the table is always going all in all the time because it’s more fun for them, the game as whole is not as fun or exciting.
Normally poker is exciting at least in part if not largely due to the money, but as Picard explains to the ‘evil’ 1970s capitalist, Federation people get excited simply at the prospect of learning and growing and challenging themselves.
I’m pretty sure Data could track the shuffle if he wanted to.
Or he could choose not to, but deliberately playing below your abilities is less fun and less challenging, and we’re rapidly getting back to what (other than bolstering the XO’s ego) is the point of the game.
Maybe the game is an experiment on Data’s part to refine his models of the crew.
“I know Worf has two pair and Riker is showing three of a kind. I wonder if he’ll raise if I give him a full house or attempt to bluff?”
Data can stack the deck when he shuffles if he wants. It was a plot point of one episode.
When Data time-travelled back to 1893 he used his poker skills to build a small fortune so he could assemble the technology to attempt to resolve his problem.
Why do they use explicit military ranks then? Also the Enterprise of Picard seems to be pretty clearly the most powerful warship if you compare it to any one (or often many) Klingon/Romulan warships. Voyager after it got slingshotted to another part of the galaxy was, again, a relative military juggernaut.
Your explanation does not hold my viewing of what actually happens.
The relative power of the Enterprise and Voyager can be explained a bit by something you see even back in TOS where ship combat is mostly just a power game and whoever has the bigger engine/battery is stronger. They have bigger engines/batteries because the federation is technologically superior to all of their main antagonists in general, with the Romulans being the closest but still probably a bit behind.
In as much as it is not just a power game, the Federation is behind, Starfleet vessels use phasers, the phaser is presented as a sort of omnitool for energy output, and there are several points in almost each trek where they talk about this in contrast to explicit weapons intended simply to damage the thing you point them at. Janeway tries to find ways to turn energy into more Dakka on Voyager, Archer does the same, ultimately this commitment to the ‘mining laser’ of the trek verse as a primary weapon doesn’t hurt them too much, because generally the mining laser is good enough if you put enough power into it.
Weren’t the conquistadores militarized explorers? I like to think of captain Kirk as a future Pizzarro.
They were more like privateers, including pre-arranged shares of the loot – and in some cases their authority to act on behalf of the crown was questionable.
In case it wasn’t clear, I meant that very much tongue-in-cheek.
But, note fibio’s comment below. I think at this age (14-1500s), the distinction between military and other crown business was not so clear as it would be later on. This is the eve of feudalism, and before conscription and standing armies of professional soldiers (I think?), so the difference between a noble given a ship and some men, and a noble given a regiment of cavalry to command, might not have been so large.
Indeed, my understanding is that Cortes’ conquest of Mexico was more or less an act of mutiny, which was one seldom-mentioned factor in destroying his ships (he didn’t want any communications with Cuba, one way or the other).
Individual initiative played a huge role in the Spanish conquest of the New World, and can’t really be compared to how Spain conducted European wars.
They already knew Mexico was there though…
They knew the coast of Mexico was there. This was in the days before satellite photos. Or even GPS.
It really isn’t. Star Trek, at least for the original series, leaned heavily on the Age of Discovery themes of a lone ship out in the infinite
voidsea, where the Captain was God and help was a thousand miles away. In the real world these initial voyages by the Europeans were heavily militarized, usually employed the same seamen as the Navy, were captained by well connected men of the court and funded in part in whole by the crown. It may not technically have been the Navy doing the exploration, but it was certainly the state which is pretty much the same thing when you get down to it.It seems to me that Roddenberry’s mental model for the voyages of the USS Enterprise under Captain James Kirk was fairly clearly voyages like that of the HMS Endeavour under Captain James Cook, or the HMS Discovery under Captain Clerke, or the HMS Enterprise under Captain James Clark Ross. One first season episode which introduced the famous Khan had him on board a ship called USS Botany Bay, a callback to Cook’s voyage. Three Space Shuttles were named Enterprise, Endeavour, and Discovery, and Discovery is the name of the latest show in the Trek franchise.
Two ways in which Roddenberry’s understanding of history could have been improved would have been to have there be private exploration as well, equivalent to the Spice Race (which I think the Space Race was consciously named after). He could have had episodes similar to those where the Klingons are meddling on a planet, but the meddlers are commercial explorers.
The other way would be to have the science roles played not by Science Officers in the structure of command, but civilians outside it, causing trouble on the ship for the hapless captain tasked with taking care of them.
Didn’t Stargate Atlantis do some of that? There was at least one civilian, but he was oversight.
In the Star Trek universe, this role is sufficiently filled by the children of bridge officers (some of whom happen to be just as smart and capable as the average starfleet officer!)
Stargate Universe did much more of this, with the military and scientists forming their own parallel hierarchies.
Captain Meriwether Lewis, Lieutenant William Clark, Captain James Cook, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, Admiral Richard Byrd – this is not a novel setup.
Exploration is a business dominated by uncertainty and mortal danger, including the bit where you discover that lots of people want you dead, it is conducted at the far end of a logistical tail leading from home to the ass end of nowhere, and you don’t get to call a time out on account of weather. The operating environment of military forces is, well, you do the math. If you’re at war, the only exploratory-like thing you’re going to be doing is called reconnaissance. If you’re not at war and you find you want explorers, the not-at-war part means you’ve probably got an army and a navy that aren’t presently occupied with their core business.
Interesting. I don’t really know the names. Did they often take naval flagships to uncharted, or charted, but not landed upon islands?
The Enterprise wasn’t really a flagship though, most of the time. Neither Kirk nor Picard were flag officers for their series, and Enterprise only rarely lead a fleet. The very concept of a “flagship” is kind of meaningless without a fleet to lead.
They call it the flagship a few times in setting, andStarfleet does occasionally muster it’s fleets in a more fleet like shape.I missed the ‘really’ on my first read though.
Original series Enterprise wasn’t a flag ship, just a middle-rate, and next generation Enterprise wasn’t sent on a voyage of exploration. Trek underwent a fan service process similar to Who, where the leads went from being Just Ordinary among their people to Most Important Evar. The Starfleet arrowhead was originally only the Enterprise’s ship logo, for instance.
You don’t know Lewis and Clark?
Nit: Largest class of Starfleet vessel in canonical TOS, but there were fourteen of the class and the Enterprise wasn’t the first or foremost.
Now, how many nerd points can I claim if I list them all from memory?
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Pbafgryyngvba
Ragrecevfr
Rkpnyvohe
Vagercvq
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Inyvnag
Xbatb
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Alas, my nerd-fu is weak.
Then it’s another case of Roddenberry not accurately understanding how these things are done. I thought “cruiser” was overpowered for a voyage. National navies tend to keep their big ships to hand, and use much smaller vessels for exploring, keeping sailors and officers employed and in practice while also being out of everyone’s hair at home. HMS Endeavour was a Yorkshire collier bought in by the Navy specially at Yorkshireman Cook’s recommendation, as he admired the type (for its toughness? bean might know). Cook wasn’t the only one, as other RN exploratory vessels had the same origin.
HMS Beagle was a Cherokee class brig/sloop, and the type was used as a mail packet, but also for survey missions, despite being unpopular as a design for shipping water all over the deck.
There’s a full size replica of the Golden Hind in London, and it’s shockingly small, though that’s a case of a private expedition, only partly sponsored by the queen.
Speaking of civilian versus serviceman scientists, Captain Fitzroy was the actual scientist in charge of meeting the RN’s hydrography mission goals, but he had felt the lack of a land geologist on earlier missions, so he invited young Charles Darwin aboard, at Darwin’s expense (rich family, he could afford it).
Darwin’s other function was to be someone outside the command structure for Fitzroy to talk to and not go mad. He had a family history of mental illness, and the Beagle also had a history of captains blowing their brains out from overwork. Lest anyone think job-related stress and suicidal depression is a modern thing.
Bringing it full circle, A E van Vogt’s 50’s fix-up novel with the on-the-nose title Voyage of the Space Beagle is considered to be one of the inspirations for Star Trek, and some of its sections to be inspirations for original series episodes.
I know the story, but I suppose not enough to remember he was a highish ranking military officer. I always assumed they would lose any real military battle had it come to that.
On the other hand, the Chinese treasure fleet ships were goddamn monsters, since the Chinese wanted to awe the people they found.
Wilkes had two sloops-of-war and six smaller vessels totaling 2,584 tons and 63 guns, compared to 2,200 tons and 52 tons for a Constitution-class heavy cruiser, er, frigate.
But there’s a historical mismatch between the age of sail and the age of Starfleet, in that the early waves of global exploration mostly predate the rise of formal navies, with both maritime exploration and naval war being performed by semi-private adventurers in semi-private ships.
By the time professional navies dominated both trades, the world had been sufficiently explored that it was clear any new life and new civilizations left to be discovered could not match even the smallest European warship. Furthermore, the rules had been sufficiently well codified that exploratory vessels of the various European powers wouldn’t wind up shooting at each other outside of declared wars. Navy ships still did most of the exploring, for reasons already noted, but it could be safely left to auxiliaries and unrated warships.
Starfleet, knows that its exploratory ships will be encountering potentially hostile aliens whose own martial and technical capabilities are comparable to its own, and in that context naval cruisers make more sense than fleet auxiliaries.
Has Scott ever reported back that the unlikely intervention described in his 2013 article “Can You Condition Yourself?” “https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/19/can-you-condition-yourself/” hasn’t worked? Scott has managed to remain a productive blogger for 6 years, while he has a dayjob that doesn’t involve blogging. This is very atypical, most bloggers burn out faster than that. If there’s a simple explanation for how ha managed to be productive, I’d like to know his secret.
> Scott has managed to remain a productive blogger for 6 years, while he has a dayjob that doesn’t involve blogging. This is very atypical, most bloggers burn out faster than that. If there’s a simple explanation for how ha managed to be productive, I’d like to know his secret.
I would guess the secret is that he’s intrinsically motivated to learn/think about ideas and then write-up blog posts on them. Most bloggers that burnout are probably doing it for some mixture of external motivations, e.g. Notoriety, Money, etc.
Do what you love and it’ll be easy to look super-productive. Unfortunately I (and many others) love being lazy and/or doing other ‘unproductive’ activities. Probably best not to compare and judge yourself for that too harshly.
Our current pandemic is caused by a virus that is of the same family as SARS in 2003.
While everybody is trying to limit the spread of the current disease, could it be an advantage to get infected and thus immunity? SARS was at least ten times as lethal, and it’s not unlikely that the next corona epidemic is much more dangerous. Could immunity to COVID-19 confer some immunity to other, more lethal strains?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome-related_coronavirus
Obviously coronaviruses != influenzaviruses, but for what it’s worth, the flu viruses change so much that they have to make a new vaccine every year. So immunity doesn’t help with the flu at least.
Isn’t the family that they are both part of also the same family that includes one of the viruses that causes colds?
Assuming that is correct, I’m not sure the information that they are part of the same family is that informative, since that would lead us to expect that having a cold is a good thing.
Are we sure that is not? Is there only one strain of flu or colds every year?
I’m guessing wildly here, but lethality and virulence seem to be two very different things. So next year, we could have several new mutations, some would be different enough that they evade last year’s antibodies (in which case we are no better or worse off), but others might have changed to become much more lethal. If we are too successful at stopping the pandemic, the “lucky” ones that avoided COVID-19 may be many enough that the new virus can spread, and thus not very lucky at all.
I seem to remember that some flu strains disproportionally affected younger people, and that presumably old folks had the right antibodies from an earlier sweep.
There are at least four other endemic coronaviruses that humans do not seem to build up lasting immunity to (that represent ~15 of common colds, and that people seem to get every few years) so it seems unlikely. However SARS is more closely related to COVID than any of those, so it’s possible that COVID exposure could help you if the next outbreak happened to be a similar strain and was soon enough. Better argument would be that a vaccine against coronaviruses might help us both now and against future outbreaks (while also reducing colds by 15%)
If you want to learn more, there is a publically available seminar given by Dr Mark Denison at Vanderbilt (who studies coronaviruses) that can be found here: https://twitter.com/ISARICAR/status/1234661509277470720
Alright, so to continue my look into mining and mining communities before WWII, below is a link looking at the poverty and hardships of everyday living these people faced. I began thinking a lot about how famous tenement housing and urban poverty in major cities is widely taught in schools here in the US, but rural poverty other than the Great Depression is largely ignored. What other things in history get focused on or ignored because of their proximity to major cities?
Dark as a Dungeon- Mining in Appalachian Kentucky: Part 2
Rural poverty is still largely ignored, although it appears more people are starting to become aware of it.
When people connect the dots between rural poverty, minimum wage (and indeed any policy which favors centralization, which is most of them), and network effects… well, it tends to encourage people to not pay attention to rural poverty.
There may be a level of cognitive dissonance between the material markers of what city dwellers consider poor living and what rural poverty, given that the hazards of financial instability from a renter is very different from financial instability in the country. To the city dweller, the rural poor appear to still have several things that city dweller desires, and not see the things that the rural poor lack in the tradeoff.
This is a really good point. And I guess now that I’m thinking about it more (and hearing more about coronavirus every minute of the day), the threat of disease in cramped conditions was obviously more severe.
Thanks. I’ve enjoyed reading these.
Thanks for reading! The source material I list in part one is extremely interesting.
I’ve got at least 2 more parts coming!
Anybody know some good fonts/font combinations for printed academic/technical writing?
Preferably ones that are easy to \usepackage into pdflatex.
Also I have a soft spot for geometric sans-serifs like Futura and Erbar Grotesk. Has a kind of Wirtschaftwunder æsthetic.
Posting here more or less to maybe call Scott’s attention to it, as it seems like the kind of thing he’d be interested in.
https://twitter.com/iandonald_psych/status/1238518371651649538
https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1238418007824764930
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/behavioural-scientists-form-new-front-in-battle-against-coronavirus
Some twitter threads and an article on how the UK government’s response to the Corona Virus is rooted in some fascinating mathematical modelling and psychology techniques.
It seems kabbalistically interesting that the “Princess” line of cruise ships has featured so prominently in the “crown virus” outbreak.