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Huge market news: Federal Reserve unloaded with a large rate cut and massive QE program and Market futures hit limit down and tripped breakers (5% down) within 15 mins of opening.
I wonder if these actions to prop up the market only incentivising further selling because every time it goes back up, that’s an opportunity to profit on the next decline (“buy low, wait for an injection, sell relatively high”). There’s zero incentive for people to buy after the market’s shot back up from an injection. Rather than taking such drastic actions to make the market swing back up, shouldn’t the government be aiming for simply a stabilisation at the lower level, so that increases in the stock market come from genuine growth?
As of March 1st, the US had 70 confirmed cases*, Spain had 76, France had 100, and Germany had 117. Now, two weeks later, The US has 60 deaths, Spain has 291, France has 91, and Germany only has 11.
What is Spain doing so wrong that they are so far ahead in deaths? What is Germany doing so right?
* I’m guessing the US probably had a lot more than the reported number due to the testing issues.
One theory I’ve heard is that Southern Europe has multigenerational families, whereas Northern Europe has nuclear families and nursing homes, making it easier to quarantine the elderly.
So did Spain, and all the rest. To varying degrees that will make the sort of comparison you are trying to do, almost impossibly complicated. But the idea that every nation other than the United States has tested every possibly-infected person and that their reported case count is the total number of infections, is almost certainly way off.
Obviously the number of cases is always going to be higher than the actual confirmed numbers, but I was under the impression that the US had particularly bad issues with testing compared to other countries. Did these countries have similar issues?
As of March 14, the rate of positive tests in the US was 16% (3155
out of 19744), in Italy it was 19% (21157 out of 109170), in South Korea it was 3% (8162 out of 268212). A lower rate should correspond to more extensive testing, and thus (presumably) a bigger percentage of the cases diagnosed.
Devil’s advocate position that I do not hold, but I suspect is part of some people’s indifference to COVID, but is too taboo to say out loud.
Would it be so bad to let the pandemic run its natural course? More that other respiratory illness, it targets very old very sick people with low life expectancies, who don’t work. There is an issue with running out of hospital beds and ventilators, but it would not be a first in history to ration them – after all ventilators didn’t always exist.
It certainly fits with the view of humans as interchangeable vessels of GDP.
There’s already conspiracy theories and dark humor about this being a way to solve social security and pension issues. Would it be so bad? Certainly less bad than the Spanish Flu. The world would survive; the modern economy would survive. I expect there would be long-term negative mental health effects, though.
I’m not sure I would look at the following 25 years after the Spanish Flu and conclude that the modern economy would survive.
The Spanish Flu coincided with WWI; it also had a higher mortality rate and it killed young adults. And still the economies of the powers which did not lose WWI survived (the Great Depression certainly was not due to the Spanish Flu).
The GD was an outgrowth of WW1, including the Spanish Flu.
What do you mean by that and how do you know?
Many people claim that the GD was an outgrowth of WWI, but not in ways that the Spanish Flu would contribute.
One issue that contributed to the GD was the massive productivity loss by the generation that was decimated in WW1 and during the influenza outbreak.
The productivity of the roaring 20’s was high. Why would the loss of young adults suddenly affect the economy in the 30’s and not 20’s?
to kill enough people to make a serious difference in pension issue, it would have to be worse than the spanish flu. And remember, the pension crisis isn’t really so much about current pensioners as it is about the boomers coming up. Knocking off everyone over 80 (which in the US is still 12 million people) doesn’t actually change the math that much.
You are probably bankrupting a few life insurance companies in the process as well.
I’d expect the amount gains from paying a smaller amount of annuities is greater than the loss of paying death benefits a few years early
The problem is paying out a large number of death benefits at the same time which requires liquidating assets and we are currently in an environment where you don’t want to be liquidating assets. If you have 5 years worth of deaths in year 1 during a crash you are losing out on
1. The annuity payments
2. The compounding interest on the payouts that would have been averaged over the next 5 years
3. Taking a lower price on your assets that you have to sell.
Lehman didn’t go bankrupt because they people stopped paying their mortgages, they went under because they couldn’t raise capital to ride out the decline in housing prices that reduced the value of their collateral .
I’d expect the number of 80 year olds who actually have life insurance is small relative to the numbers collecting annuities. Assuming they have 10 year government bonds rather than equities against their contracts the insurance companies aren’t suffering that much loss from loss of assets.
If they have bonds from cruise ship operators then they’re screwed.
And I was thinking of diversified insurance companies. There are companies that specialize in life insurance for the elderly for estate planing so they are hurting although I would think that they would have some reinsurance since an epidemic affecting the elderly was not a farfetched notion.
I do not trust any industry to do what anyone would think they probably should do in the interest of financial prudence, at the expense of yesterday/today’s bottom line, generally.
> is too taboo to say out loud
(But still not too taboo to be the position of the UK government apparently <gd&r>)
> Would it be so bad to let the pandemic run its natural course?
What do you mean by “so bad”? Almost definitely not Black Death bad, most likely not WW2 bad either, but very possibly Spanish Flu bad.
> it targets very old very sick people with low life expectancies
It mostly kills very old very sick people, because we have enough ICUs. But among people who only survive thanks to ICUs there are plenty of 60-year-olds, 50-year-olds, even some 40-year-olds. If we run out of ICUs, lots of people will die who would otherwise live (and work) several decades longer.
The growth rate of COVID-19 in western countries (about +25%/day i.e. +0.1 dB/day) seems optimized for us to approximate extrapolations in our head (e.g. one doubling in about 3 days, one fivefold increase in about 7 days, one order-of-magnitude increase in about 10 days).
Also, the Italian prime-minister decrees remind me of Uriel from UNSONG during the Long March.
With all the talk about closing schools, is there a reliable source about how much COVID-19 is transmitted by children?
I understand children are much less at risk of dying/getting serious complications from the virus, but I’m hearing wildly different stories about how much they play a role as transmission vectors.
Hi, I haven’t posted in a while, and I hope that people are still reading this open thread, because I need an answer fast, and this is the best place that I know to get a good one.
My parents, age 70, live in Lincoln NE (population 285 thousand, no reported cases of Covid-19 yet, 17 reported cases in the State, schools just closed and are preparing to go online). They pretty much run a bridge club, most of whose members are in their 70s but generally in good health. The club has an event planned for tonight (March 15 Sunday), at which 26 people are expected to show up and sit at card tables in close proximity, moving from table to table over the course of the evening. There will be hand sanitizer available at the tables.
Question: Should they cancel the event?
Please give reasons for your answer as if you’re trying to convince a stubborn Boomer (but not a Trump-supporter). You may assume that your audience is mathematically literate. If you know any data on age-related risks that controls for other risk factors, then that would be a big bonus. (Because since heart disease, diabetes, and lung disease are all risk factors for Covid-19, and since they’re also all more prevalent among older people, maybe age alone is not much of a risk factor all.)
Don’t argue for your parents’ sake. Argue for their friends’ — even if they get off scot free, do they really want to risk getting one of their bridge club friends sick?
Since almost nobody has been tested, we don’t know how many carriers there are in Lincoln, only that nobody has come down with a sufficiently serious case to be recognized as such. Given the incubation period, that means, roughly, that there were no more than three or four people infected as of a week ago, so probably fewer than a dozen now. That suggests that the probability that any particular person living in the city is infected is under about 1/20,000. With 26 people showing up, the chance that at least one of them has the virus is under about 1/1000, the chance that any particular person attending will die as a result under 1/10,000, given mortality rates for the elderly and supposing a high probability of getting the virus if someone there has it.
To that one should add the additional risk of transmission to others. If the party is held, the chance that one of the 26 will get it is under 26/1000 (again assuming a high probability of transmission). One more person having it now will result in several more people getting it over the next few weeks — I haven’t followed the discussion of transmission risks well enough to say more than that.
So that gives something vaguely around .1 infections as an upper bound on the expected value of additional infections due to holding the party, something around 1/400 as an upper bound on the number of deaths among those attending to be expected due to holding the party. That’s a very back of the envelope calculation, and probably someone here who has followed the evidence more closely can do better.
I should probably add that I cancelled the final two talks in my speaking tour of Europe a few days ago and flew back to the U.S., as some evidence of my subjective probability that the threat is real — I’m 75.
Part of the reason that I did so — my younger son had been trying to persuade me to cancel for some days by then — was that I remembered my past discussion of the difference between fluid intelligence and crystalized intelligence. The former figures out the solution to a problem, the latter relies on the solution figured out in the past. One effect of aging is to make one put more weight on crystalized intelligence. I was forming my judgement on my past experience of dealing with risks, which did not include any plague this serious, so might well be reaching an incorrect conclusion.
The same might be true for your parents and their friends, for the same reason.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/
Hope this is helpful, there are some risk factors including age here.
Yeah, I’ve seen those. In theory, I could estimate the danger of age alone by using the data there and looking up the correlations between age and the other listed risk factors. But I was hoping that this had already been done (or that we even had direct numbers).
If you care about other people, your math should take into account that there will probably be many, many cases causally “downstream” from each current case. I back of the envelope calculate that getting the virus today may cause around 10 *deaths* later in the epidemic. So if you are not selfish you will cancel anything that is not absolutely essential.
How did you make that calculation?
We are now in the phase of community transmission. Relevant authorities have asked us to practice social distancing. “No reported cases here yet” is not the same thing as “no cases here yet”. Since it’s impossible to know who has been in contact with someone infected, or in contact with someone who has been in contact with someone infected, it is more prudent to cancel public gatherings.
If there are cases of COVID-19 in your state, then the virus is present and is going to spread. Better safe than sorry is always a good rule.
Other versions of this question: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/15/open-thread-149-5/#comment-865535 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/coronavirus-open-thread#fX3opvAw6nenMgpTK
I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the game went on last night as planned. The good news is that my parents won’t be attending any more large games. The bad news is that there are still going to be more large games, at least one tonight. Although it’s mostly the same population every time.
The club is now closed until further notice.
Do you think that you made a difference, either to the timing of the closing, or the timing of your parents’ withdrawal?
Hard to say. Very roughly, I’d say about 50% chance that my influence stopped them from going to the game on Monday and an expected value of about 0.5 day earlier that the club closed due to their withdrawal (so 0.25 day due to my influence). And only 10% probability that they even had a game scheduled for Tuesday. So in the end, a 2.5% probability that I stopped a bridge game.
I’ll let you estimate the effects of that if you want; also look at David Friedman’s calculations upthread. (But keep in mind that most of the people who met on Monday and would have possibly met on Tuesday already met on Sunday.)
https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727
This seems plausible. I am hoping someone can debunk it.
I agree with the part that we can never flatten the curve enough. Someone in here made a similar point.
But he seems to be arguing we need to re-contain the virus. That is impossible. The heck? That’s never happening.
When I read the start, I assumed he was going to argue for the UK system, of “let’s get the herd immunity over with.”
“When I read the start, I assumed he was going to argue for the UK system, of “let’s get the herd immunity over with.””
The UK has made moves to abandon that I think.
Which is correct IMO. That strategy requires you to have very good handle on how many cases you have and how quickly they are spreading. You miss community spread or you miss the ‘tipping point’ (where the number of cases reaches a point where your ‘severe case’ numbers tip over your ICU capacity) and you’re fucked.
That, plus we don’t really have a good handle on how immunity works post-exposure. FWIW I think that the reports of re-infection in China and Japan are significantly more likely to be testing issues than legitimate prospects.
Have they given up already? It was just announced today.
Let me state: I do not know their way is better. But I worry that all countries are adopting one pattern not because it’s best, but because no one wants to risk deviating from that one pattern. The “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft” of pandemic planning.
How long do you think we will need to keep the country on lockdown?
BTW, “herd immunity” is a crude way of explaining it, even though it’s the term I used. And this guy has a long explanation of why
https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1238821515526897664
Perhaps i’m wrong there, I apologise. I think it’s a bad call in terms of strategy. They’re right when they say it’s going to run through a lot of the population but limiting spread is really hard. I find arguing strategy weird though – conatinment and mitigation go hand in hand.
“How long do you think we will need to keep the country on lockdown?”
I don’t really know to be honest. What is lockdown? Is it full Quarantine for everyone ala Hubei, or limiting gatherings, working from home and quarantining anyone with symptoms?
From my perspective the single biggest issue is ICU capacity. Beds, ventilators and (not-sick) qualified staff to run them. Time is absolutely key in ramping that up. I don’t expect most western countries to be able to pull a Hubei, but going all out now gives you that time.
Nothing to debunk IMO.
There’s not really a point to that beyond, ‘the US is already fucked’. Which is completely true, I think the numbers coming out indicate you guys have had unchecked community spread for a while now. The fact there’s still testing issues in some states is just ridiculous. If those premises are true then I don’t think there’s any way for the US to keep the curve below the conceivable ICU (permanent and temporary) capacity.
That said, the title is completely wrong and possibly editorialised. Flattening the curve is going to be necessary at every step of this. Containment, mitigation, every conceivable strategy should be geared towards that.
No, the US is not “already fucked”. It’s not too late. Daegu, South Korea has about 6000 cases, that’s proportionate to 770000 cases in the US. And they got their outbreak under control (new cases per day now are down over 90% from the peak) by widespread isolation and testing. The US could do the same if it had the political will…
SK have tested more that 200 000 people, and are keeping close watch of their populace, in particular potentially infected people. What is being done in the US? The number of deaths is similar (62 in US vs 75 in SK), but growing faster in the US.
Or just check the graphs here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ and https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea
This might be a tangent, but I’ve been seeing it a lot and I’m not sure the best way to compare countries.
Is the proper way to compare countries by raw number or by proportions?
I think 1 person in a community of 100 being a carrier is a much safer scenario than 100 in a community of 10,000. Bigger communities have bigger network effects.
I see some people online using raw counts, others using proportions.
The fact there’s still testing issues in some states is just ridiculous.
Drive-through testing? Seems to be happening here. Is the limiting factor “getting enough kits, and kits we’re sure are reliable” out? I know there was some almighty cock-up with the FDA and testing in the USA, but I also see the point of not letting sixty-dozen different test kits be used when you don’t have a common standard for “will this one actually detect the virus or not, and how many false positives/negatives for this particular test?” because crappy testing kits that falsely tell people “nah, you’re fine!” are going to make the transmission rates even worse than they already might be.
Drive through testing appears to be happening here as well. Judging by the information we got from a local provider, you interact with someone online to determine if you are likely to have the disease and, if you are, do a drive through test.
Nostalgebraist critiqued it in a tumblr post. Key point is that the math is wrong because he’s using a Gaussian instead of an exponential curve.
ETA: Caveat lector: I don’t have the math chops to say who is right. I’m just forwarding the argument along.
I think this is the link you meant.
Dammit. How did that even happen? Thank you.
(Edit: already said.)
The tumblr post isn’t actually constructive criticism; it says that the Gaussian is bad, but doesn’t say how bad it is.
I think the shape of the curve doesn’t matter. The best case for the “flattening the curve” argument is a completely unrealistic flat curve in which we take the projected 180 million cases, and say that we’re going to see a constant number of them a day until they’ve all gotten sick. This is going to give us the smallest number possible for how wide the “flattened” curve needs to be, because any other shape is wasting some hospital space at the beginning before we have that many cases every day.
If we have 170000 ventilators, and each one is in use for 4 weeks, then we can only handle about 6000 new critical cases a day, or about 100000 (0.1 million) new cases total a day. If there’s going to be 180 million cases, then that’s going to require flattening the curve to at least 1800 days (5 years). This is already bad.
If we assume that the curve has any kind of peak shape, whether Gaussian, sigmoid, exponential, or whatever, then it looks more like a triangle than like a flat line. A triangle has half the area of a rectangle, which means 10 years instead of 5 years.
So yeah, the “over a decade” thing in the Medium post sounds about right.
Of course, we can hope to combine flattening the curve with coming with a vaccine, improving hospital capacity, or hoping that the summer fixes everything. If all that this strategy is intended to do is stall for time until one of these things helps, then it’s much more plausible.
“Flattening the curve” is just a pithy slogan. Obviously, slowing the spread is also intended to reduce the number of total cases through a number of mechanisms. But “stalling for time” doesn’t sound as inspiring.
That’s very sensitive to exactly what percentage of patients require ICU care, which seems still uncertain.
Once you start talking years, it’s safe to assume a treatment or vaccine will be effective.
No, it isn’t. We don’t have either for the common cold, for instance.
Because the “common cold” is many (at least 200) viruses and isn’t serious enough to bother with much of an effort to cure.
This is much more serious, but so far single strain. I think worst case it ends up like the flu, which has enough strains that vaccines are only partially effective, but we know it pretty well and have a decent treatment protocol.
We have no vaccines for any coronavirus. There is nothing like a guarantee we can get one within a year. We could get one which works as well as measles vaccine. We could get one which works as poorly as flu vaccine. Or we could get nothing at all, or a vaccine that results in your death when challenged (e.g. through this mechanism — though this is in mice)
The shape of the curve doesn’t matter, to first order. The relevant variables are the _total_ number of infections requiring ICU beds (or ventilators, whichever is the limiting resource) before herd immunity is achieved, and the length of stay in the ICU (or time on ventilator) prior to recovery or death. This gives you the length of time you have to impose sufficient restrictions to “flatten the curve”.
Edit: ninja’ed by @Kindly.
We’re all assuming the number of ventilators is constant. How long do they take to make? How fast can we get more?
(On the other hand, what I’m actually hoping for here is a vaccine sometime next year.)
That’s a great question that no government or hospital owners seem to be answering.
The British government is negotiating with manufacturers in other sectors (cars etc.) to switch their production lines over to making ventilators and crash-retraining medical staff from other specialisms. They also expect to requisition hotels for use as hospitals. I imagine other countries are looking at similar measures, but I’ve yet to see any actual numbers for what can be expected when.
Okay, I partially answered my own question: it is happening. “A number of companies around the globe” currently make ventilators and are ramping up production. That’s good. But, they’re understandably facing large orders from around the globe. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any stats yet on how much production will be ramped up; hopefully we can replicate the production feats of WWII.
They are making more, but you also need trained personnel to run them. One nurse can’t manage 20 people on ventilators even if there are more ventilators. (This is a simplification, obviously no patient will be treated by only one nurse all the time).
Number of ventilators is a problem, but increasing that number doesn’t solve the “hospital overload” problem.
First year respiratory therapy student here, and you’d be surprised. I haven’t learned much about vents yet, but I do know they’re usually everyone’s toughest subject. I’ll be learning about them over the summer, assuming this doesn’t screw up my schooling.
You really do want RTs, not nurses, running those things. Nurses don’t know when and why to adjust the settings, they don’t know what PEEP is, they aren’t trained to do arterial blood gas draws (which are deeply invasive and can cause nerve damage if you do them wrong), and I’ve heard stories about doctors screwing up vent management, let alone nurses (typically by obsessing over blood CO2, when it’s pH that matters).
There’s a fair amount of maintenance involved, of both the patients and the machines, and I would be pretty nervous about trusting my loved one to a tired ER nurse trying to ride herd on twenty machines she barely knows how to use. All the nurses are used to leaving the lung stuff to us.
He’s too optimistic, because he ignores the need for ICU beds for any use other than COVID. But if ventilators are the limiting factor, at least generic hospital beds will be available for other purposes.
If you could really dampen it that much, just a little more and you could snuff it out. Also, if you can delay the peak by a year, then you can vaccinate.
I’m having trouble parsing that sentence. Is the “1.” supposed to be before the word “without”, or does the “without” apply to 1, 2, and 3?
I think it applies to all three.
“Flattening the curve” is simplistic and basically wrong. Bach’s rebuttal is itself simplistic, and at best less wrong. Both Bach and the curve-flatteners are making the same false assumption, that the number of people who will ultimately be infected is constant, and that all we are doing is changing the timing. Bach, and most of the curve-flatteners, seem to be using the basic 1-(1/R0) model for herd immunity; if R0 is 2.0, half the population is infected, if it’s only 1.5, 33% of the population, R0=2.5 infects 60% of the population, and so forth.
There are some problems with that model and its assumption of a homogeneous population, but the bigger problem is that R0 is not fixed. Indeed, everything we are doing, privately and publicly, is to reduce R0. In the baseline case, let’s say(*) R0=2.0, the average carrier is infectious over a period of maybe two weeks and infects two people over that time. One infection per week per carrier until they’re dead or quarantined or recovered. For the “flatten the curve” model to work at constant R0, we’d have to reduce the infection rate to one per month but also somehow keep the carriers contagious for two months each. That would keep R0 at 2.0, keep the total infections at 50% of the population, but spread them over a period four times greater. And, as Bach notes, still swamp the ICUs.
But nobody’s doing that. I’m not sure how we even could do that. Carriers are still going to be infectious for about two weeks. If the hand washing and social distancing and travel restrictions and institutional closures and whatnot reduce the infection rate to one per month per carrier, that means the effective R0 goes to 0.5 and the simple 1-(1/R0) model goes to -100% of the population infected. Slightly less simplistically, the actively-infected population peaks at maybe a factor of two greater than it was when we crossed below R0 = 1.0, and then declines exponentially, being halved every two weeks.
Keep that up long enough, and the infected population goes to zero and COVID-19 is extinct (except in bats in Wuhan or whatever). More realistically, we keep it up until the actively infected population is small enough and the availability of test kits is large enough that we can have public health authorities do contact tracing, testing, and quarantine can keep R0 below 1.0 even as the broad isolation measures are rolled back.
That, is the goal. Not a “flattening” of the curve while being resigned to the same total number of infections, but turning the curve into an exponential decay and keeping the infection total small.
Being a month or two late on starting, means having to suffer maybe an order of magnitude more infections and deaths than we would have if we’d been on the ball, and it means needing a month or two more of the broad community isolation measures before we can turn it over to the local public-health authorities for mopping up. And quitting prematurely, would also mean more infections on the rebound spike and an ultimately more disruptive second wave of isolation to bring it under control. But it’s still potentially a very big win, with much much less than half the population ever being infected at the end of it.
“Flattening the curve”, aside from not really working, promises so much less than that.
* All numbers arbitrary, within the plausible range but chosen mostly to simplify the math.
Exactly.
China has contained the outbreak, not by “flattening” 500 million cases over an extended time, but by controlling the exponential growth so that there have been only 80000 cases total.
Similarly South Korea, with 10000 cases rather than a “flattening” of 25 million cases.
“Flatten the curve until herd immunity is achieved” isn’t possible. But you really only need to slow things down until either a vaccine or treatment is available, or the virus turns out to be seasonal and Peters out over the summer.
If it’s seasonal, that means it comes back in winter/fall. Can we really make a regular thing out of basically shutting down our economy and civic life?
The main point, that flattening the curve alone isn’t realistically enough by itself seems right.
That said, there may be some value to it.
1. Every case (that needed medical support) recovered before support hits capacity is another life saved.
2. If the volunteer/paid infectees are all age 18-35 and healthy (very low risk of death, and generally more likely to spread the virus than other demographics I think)
a government could infect groups as large as or larger than half the available medical support every week very safely.
More aggressively, take the 6% number seriously, and every two weeks infect 16 times the current available support. This would boost 2b.
The infected would obviously need to be under quarantine.
2a. This could save thousands (really depends on how much support is available, but multiplying the amount of time medical support is working close to capacity is multiplying lives saved) of lives if containment doesn’t work out.
2b. This would boost ‘partial herd immunity’ levels very quickly, by taking younger more energetic people out of circulation immediately and returning them with an immunity (we sure hope….).
If this is combined with intense containment measures for vulnerable people (to keep them safe) and partial quarantines on the rest of the country I could see this having a huge effect.
The only real reason not to do this imo is that we don’t know what long term damage might result from the disease, there are recovered cases who lost some lung function.
My guess is that the dotted grey line of ‘capacity’ is wildly misleading as well, and I suspect it should slope down and to the right.
Or the reverse, assuming there are any plans at all in the works to expand our ability to deal with severe cases.
There is a convincing amount of evidence showing how productivity drops as people get fatigued. As we are hitting the ‘max’ that our system can handle the most valuable people will be getting exhausted (and sick), there will be more mistakes made, it will take longer to cure and discharge patients and there will be more crises going on in the hospitals, maintenance will suffer leading to malfunctions which will be under reported.
In 18 months (random guess) capacity might actually rise as you get a handle on it due to the expansion of services, but absent a quick, effective and mass produced vaccine it is unlikely that the other plans are going to be expansive in the short term enough to overcome the natural degradation of people’s abilities.
An OT or two ago I mentioned a problem with a leak from the tank of my kids’ bathroom toilet. Someone suggested I use the “drop of food color” test to see where the leak was. Another person (or maybe that same person, I can’t remember) suggested it might be a crack in the overflow pipe or that the dual flush system’s blue dome gasket might not be sealing correctly.
Well, I tried the food color test today. It was both helpful and mesmerizingly beautiful. I performed it twice, once on each side of the tank. I was able to diagnose two places where there seemed to be a leak: one in the seal of the dome gasket, and one in the actual gasket of the flush valve. (What do they call that? A shank gasket or something?)
I removed the tank, removed the flush valve, seated the dome gasket perfectly because I had the flush valve out and in my hands were I could look at the seal from all angles, then replaced the flush valve gasket and put everything back together.
My toilet is now leak free. Thanks to everyone for your help!
By the way, I rubbed a bit of vaseline on the flush valve gasket, as well as on the rubber washers under the tank bolts. I’ve read elsewhere (i.e. on the instruction manual for my inflatable pool’s filtration system) that vaseline helps gaskets seal and maybe prevents corrosion too. If this was a grave misstep I hope someone will “pipe up” to let me know.
Vaseline can damage rubber seals (if they are butyl or silicone rubber; OK for nitrile, but I don’t know how you can tell). Silicone grease intended for plumbing can be used for that purpose instead. Also sometimes you can use grease for that and it’ll work for a little bit and then start leaking again.
Congratulations!
Feel proud.
What are the measures of success when dealing with a pandemic? Obviously Italy feels like a failure right now, possibly France.
But especially in the USA, what result would make people (especially Trump’s opponents) say that a good job was done versus a bad job overall? Lots of people here have said that Trump has been wanting and not doing a good job, along with some specific (and accurate) mistakes that have been made.
Obviously in any response there will be mistakes, but at what point would you say “The USA did it right”? A lower death rate than China? Lower than Italy? France, the UK?
Or getting to China’s death rate while losing less of our GDP than they will?
I am curious what “success” means to people here. I’d love specific numbers, if possible.
If your answer is “I’m too partisan to admit Trump (failed/succeeded)” then that’s interesting too, I suppose.
Are you talking about a hypothetical alternate timeline? Because that ship has sailed in the one we’re living in now. The best Trump can do now is stop adding fuel to the fire.
Speaking hypothetically, an outcome like Singapore’s seems like a pretty decent success metric. I don’t think there’s anything Trump could have done that would have gotten praise from his opponents, but he could have avoided an awful lot of criticism if he hadn’t screwed things up so badly.
Are you saying we already are/are going to be substantially worse than Western Europe, or just that Trump’s initial reaction was bad enough that even if we do much better that won’t be sufficient because we should’ve done even better than that?
If we end up looking like SK in terms of number of infections and deaths per capita.
I don’t think it is far to compare us to Singapore or China because they non-democratic authoritarian regimes have more tools at their disposal (for better or worse).
No comparison is ever really fair. There isn’t a second USA out there, and we can’t rerun reality to test counterfactuals. That being said, Singapore had both advantages and disadvantages compared to the US. For example, it is much more closely connected to China and a lot more densely populated.
Also a lot hotter and more humid, both things that strongly retard spreads of typical coronaviruses.
I’ll add that for my metric if the US is worse than a major Western European country I will consider that Trump failed this. We have advantages in terms of geography and isolation, and if we end up with more per capita deaths than France/Spain/Italy because of this, we screwed up badly.
Yeah, I’d be comfortable using SK as a gold standard also. But keep in mind that regardless of the outcome, most of the blame or credit should not go to any one person; Scott Sumner’s article has this right:
https://www.econlib.org/leaders-are-followers/
For better or worse, Trump will get credit from his supporters for anything good that happens during his term and get blamed by his opponents for anything bad that happens during his term. How much of the blame or credit he deserves in any particular situation is a question that is less relevant and much more difficult to adjudicate.
IMO it should be deaths (and irreversible complications) per capita, perhaps in combination with some measure of economic damage. Infections per capita, and case fatality rate, are very dependent on the extent of testing. Of course more extensive testing has tangible benefit, but it should be counted only to the extent it helps decrease the rate of fatalities (and serious complications) per capita.
Fair point
Actually, as someone who doesn’t like Trump at all, I’ve got to say this:
Apparently you now have paid sick leave for everybody with corona.
I figured people continuing to work and avoiding getting tested because they absolutely could not afford miss work would screw over any effort the US made in containing the virus. I did not expect that to get fixed this quickly if at all. So definitely Kudos to Trump there!
Now the other two major hurdles you have is getting tested in general and figuring out how to deal with the illegal immigrants – because, regardless of your opinion on immigration, people who’re scared of the consequences of getting tested can trip up the best organized, most thought out effort to contain this.
[In my opinion, your best bet is everyone who might have it gets free testing, everyone who does have it gets free treatment (and minimum pay at least) and quarantine, and nobody asks any questions about immigration status. But immigration policies on an entirely different continent is not exactly my area of expertise, so I probably missed some important bits by a huge margin.]
My definition of success would be: handled it better than most industrial nations (in people dead, people out of work, school missed, etc)
My definition of acceptable would be: did about as well as the rest
My definition of fail would be: did worse
The problem is, that this is the first time we’re (regardless of continent) really dealing with a situation like this, so I’m not actually hoping for the best, I’m hoping for no overwhelmed hospitals, where doctors don’t have to decide who gets the machine and who has to basically slowly suffocate. I also really, really don’t want to bury anyone I care about. I doubt I’ll get my wish, but I guess this is as good at time to start praying as any.
I find “define success” challenging, because it seems likely that there’s a trade-off between disruption and eventual death rate – basically closing down schools and non-essential gatherings (as my state has done) will increase the economic disruption, but slow the spread down (hopefully) enough to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed and so keep both the number of people who get sick, and the proportion who die, lower.
true. this is one of those situations where “average/acceptable” and “fail” are going to be much easier to identify.
Basically that the epidemic is brought under control (R0 << 1) without an inordinate number of deaths, and that most restrictions are lifted (except travel restrictions from areas where things are not under control). “Inordinate” isn’t a great measure, but for a ceiling, if ICU beds are overwhelmed in a major urban area, that’s definitely “inordinate”.
The result is only a small part of how I’d judge whether or not Trump has done a good or bad job. But a very good result at this point would be very few outbreaks where R0 exceeded 1 long enough to infect more than ~.1% of the population on a per-city basis. You’d naturally expect rural areas to do somewhat better already. And if testing keeps going at this slow pace, then I’d have to look at mortality due to pneumonia rather than cases that certainly died due to COVID-19.
A very bad result for the U.S. would be 300,000 or more deaths due to known cases of COVID-19 deaths or suspicious clusters of pneumonia (on a nationwide basis).
My belief is that his own personal effect on things is going to matter less to the outcome at this point than a lot of other factors. We could get a very good result, and all it would really mean is that Trump didn’t make any really boneheaded mistakes. And we could get a very bad result even if he did everything perfectly from today on.
What would a failure mean to you?
@EchoChaos >
Since they’re the nations we share a spoken language with I tend to compare us to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the U.K., but mostly Canada ’cause neighbor.
AFAIK, the San Francisco bay area (where I live) has a higher rate of infection than most of the U.S.A., and the world, but given many of our residents family ties with China, and our large port unloading cargo from there that’s not surprising, outside of the bay area California seems to be fairing well, and since our Governor and the President haven’t been the best of friends befoe, but now out Governor has praised the help the Feds have done, plus that Trump closed traffic with China sooner than I imagine a Democrat would I’m cutting Trump slack for his actions.
Trump deficit seems to me to be less in actions than as “consoler in chief”, though I have a hard time imagining a President Hillary Clinton doing a better job there (Bill could, as could Obama), I imagine that Biden or Klobucher would seem more trustworthy and authoritative, Buttigieg not as much but more than Trump, Sanders and Warren wouldn’t be more consoling than Trump though Warren would I imagine seem competent, of Presidents in my lifetime I’d judge Obama, Carter and the younger Bush to be best at being “mourner in chief”.
Really for this three things are wanted from a President:
1) Good actions
2) Inspire trust
3) Seem compassionate
Because he closed off China faster than I imagine a rival would’ve I’d say Trump was pretty good on 1., but weak on 2. and 3., but in these days of hostile partisanship I fear a President may only be good on 2. and 3. for at most 60% of the electorate, my hope is a President Biden would inspire less antipathy, but Bush and Obama tried to be “uniters” without much success.
For what it’s worth, I talked to some family today who reported frustration with how complacent people are being in [red county]. It seems that Trumps rhetoric may have lulled people into a false sense of security, in which case #2 is actually negative credit.
My uncle says swine flu was worse and this is scare tactics.
Secondary to age, you are going to see a real hit among political belief among who gets walloped by this thing.
One of the potential disconnects on both sides of the partisan divide is that Red State American is likely to have a different experience than Blue State America.
Blue State is more urban (and hence living closer together) with more planned large gatherings, more universities to interrupt, and it’s also where the majority of the early cases have been.
Red State is more rural, tends to already have more physical distance between people, and is probably hit hardest by the sports programming on TV being canceled and people hoarding TP from Walmart.
If you look at the current infection map, it’s focused on the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, the numbers in Red State areas are already much higher than in Blue States.
So what may seem like an early over-reaction to one may feel justified to the other.
We here in the cities just do bullshit jobs while the real work of the country is done on farms, mines, and factories in real America. So I don’t see why red states should be worried about over-reaction, what difference doesn’t it make if those liberal effeminate elites shut down their useless cities. In fact, it should be positive as all those bankers, journalists, government bureaucrats, and Hollywood types don’t have a chance to continue destroying this country.
I’m skeptical of how influential the geographic component is.
Anecdotally, I live near my girlfriend’s conservative mother. She’s 70, and loves fox news. This woman is absolutely *cavalier* about it. Some direct quotes: “If we can’t vacation internationally, we’ll just drive around the US instead.” “It’s just like the flu.” She and her boyfriend flew to NYC last week, and talked about how they liked the markets in China town.
I don’t personally know anyone with COVID-19, so all of my knowledge/flavor is from media. So is theirs. I think the disinformation campaign is, for the moment, effective.
“Lowest mortality per capita in a democracy” is the measure elected officials need to be shooting for. There’s a large luck factor in asymptomatic virus shedding that disadvantaged polities hit earlier and low-density countries like Canada, Oz and to a lesser extent the USA have an advantage (less so if they dawdle on condon sanitaire until announcing a national lockdown like Spain did today). Never mind that: there should be a sense of friendly competition among peers, “We’ll keep you safer than anywhere else.”
If we judge them by those kind of results, we are going to get worse and worse restrictions and economic damage.
I mean, I’m expecting the US to go into national lockdown but only once ICU beds or ventilators are overwhelmed, like Italy. I don’t see your trade-offs in the future, just “near maximum restrictions and economic damage possible in a democracy but only once preventable deaths start.”
hls2003 guesstimated $900B of economic damage per month from being locked down. My guesstimate is 80 million people who are at-risk. Can we quickly build something to isolate those 80 million people with a budget of $10,000 per person per month?
Hell, give me 10K per month and I can guarantee my two elderly parents are safe, which is a 50% savings.
The lockdown is going to happen sooner or later. The sooner it happens, the less the impact of the virus AND the lockdown.
From a Trump opponent: the short answer is that if the US has around the same number of deaths and amount of economic damage as similar countries (UK, Canada, Germany, France, etc.) when this is all over then I’ll say that the Trump administration did an all right job.
But I think there is a longer and more complicated answer. It’s hard to respond to your question exactly as asked because of the particular way you phrased it: “Trump has been wanting and not doing a good job.” That phrasing has some assumptions baked in. I can offer an analogy:
Imagine that we’re on a big ship. Before launch the captain decided it wasn’t necessary to load enough life boats for all the passengers. Some people criticize the captain but they’re dismissed by the captain’s supporters. In fact, because there are fewer life boats, the ship is going faster and the journey’s more comfortable. But suddenly the ship hits an iceberg! The ship is sinking! People are rushing to the life boats but there aren’t enough! Now the captain does all he can – let’s even say that he’s a brilliant navigator and is in fact doing better than anyone else would in this situation – but he’s still criticized by his detractors. His supporters say, “how can you criticize him? He’s doing everything right! Can you really say there’s something he’s doing wrong right now?”
Some things that seem like real life missing life boats to me are tax cuts and aggressive fiscal policy during a boom time, firing the White House pandemic response team, demanding loyalty rather than competence in top-level officials, and the institutional culture created by refusing to take responsibility and deflecting blame for failures. I admit there is a lot of unreasonable criticism of Trump in the media but in my opinion there is a lot of reasonable criticism about this kind of thing. Someone can say, “nobody could predict something like this.” But that’s the entire point! The captain couldn’t predict that particular iceberg. The White House needs to be able to respond to unpredictable things and the president needs to have appointed the right people to federal agencies to deal with whatever the thing is.
While I think that the iceberg has already been hit I really hope that it hasn’t. Either way we’ll know more a year from now.
Also, the Trump Administration has consistently fallen short on executing its policies. Executive orders and policy changes are often rushed out and require weeks of clarifications, and as a result, the execution is often botched with lack of resources and training.
See, for example, the recent travel restrictions actually increasing infection risks:
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/15/816065950/travelers-greeted-with-hours-long-airport-lines-as-coronavirus-screenings-begin
So we can’t even give that much credit for what they’re doing now.
You have people at the top instituting policies which seem reasonable on paper, but they don’t have any experience with or connection to the people implementing them to be told “wait, hold on.”
They could say that, but they would be wrong. Predicting “something like this” is why Obama created the team Trump disbanded.
During the transition, Obama’s team ran a tabletop[ for Trump’s team about a flu pandemic starting in Asia and coming into the US. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/16/trump-inauguration-warning-scenario-pandemic-132797 One of the specific issues was a shortage of ventilators.
You have to prepare and plan for things like this. The plans never work out right, but it gives you a head start on thinking through some of the problems you will face.
The simplest and least-gameable metrics are number of deaths as a percentage of the affected population, and percent GDP lost to whatever countermeasures are imposed. Ideally, you’d want to do a full QALY calculation on the first part, to cover short- and long-term disability as well as death and expected remaining lifespan of the victims. And on the second part, include non-monetized losses like fewer utils of social interaction, plus debt incurred to forestall this fiscal year’s GDP loss. But all those things are more easily gamed, obscured, and endlessly debated.
For a first-order comparison, if the United States comes in at fewer deaths per capita and less per capita GDP reduction than the average Western European nation, I’d tentatively count that as a win for the United States. More, and it’s a loss. If it’s fewer deaths but more GDP loss, then we have to start putting a dollar value on human life, which is always distasteful but often nonetheless appropriate. There’s reasonable precedent for using something in the $5-10E6/life range for the life of the average American or Western European; this disease predominantly affects the elderly, so if we’re not doing a full QALY calculation I’d lean towards the low end of that range.
What does “success” mean to you? How badly does the administration’s response have to go before you deem it a failure? I think it’d be helpful for us to get a reading from you as well.
Getting America through the pandemic in a way that neither causes Great Depression 2.0 or a hundred thousand to a million dead.
As I said elsewhere, if our death rate is higher than the globally connected technocratic countries in Western Europe, I’ll consider Trump a failure. France, Spain, Italy, the UK are sort of my “comparison barometers” for this. If he hits those, he did exactly as well as the technocrats without the disadvantages (to my politics) that technocrats bring.
If he beats them substantially and gets as low as someplace like Singapore and South Korea that’s a home-run.
Economically there isn’t a solid way to know if he’s winning until at least next year, unfortunately.
I realize this is a quibble but Italy and Spain are both significantly poorer and I wouldn’t call either technocratic. If for some reason Asia doesn’t count, Germany and the UK are better comparators than Mediterranean PIIGS.
Fair. Germany and the UK are also reasonable comparisons.
They are alright comparisons, but they lack the ethnic and cultural diversity that the US has, which significantly complicates any sort of response that needs social solidarity.
@Clutzy
14.8% of the German population was an immigrant in 2017 vs 13.6% for the USA. In 2018, it was 14% for the UK.
This meme of exceptional American diversity is both wrong and tiring.
@Clutzy
There are no perfect comparison. We’re further south and warmer than most first world countries, we’re more rural, we’re more wealthy, we have a different healthcare system, etc.
@Aapje
Usually people mean ethnic diversity. The United States has had immigrants for longer, so we have people who are second and third generation immigrants and no longer counted there but are still ethnically distinct from mainline Americans.
Plus our large African-American population, which is certainly not immigrants, but is indeed quite diverse.
@Echo
I don’t think there is any perfect comparison, but typically I pretend Canada added 10% of their population as Brazilians, and estimate from there.
@EchoChaos
The US used to be known for its ‘melting pot,’ but African-Americans failed to melt, creating semi-parallel societies. The same is true in Germany and the UK for fairly large groups.
There is a reason why populism is not just popular in the US.
Nit: Roughly half of the African-Americans “melted”, once the rest of the US let them. That still leaves a significant demographic chunk of persistent non-melters, of course.
When Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke were alive, an escaped slave named Olaudah Equiano wrote a book (books were typically funded by subscription; the aforesaid notables were subscribers) about his experiences and their social implications. He recommended interracial marriage as a bulwark against the ethnogenesis of a hostile and still-oppressed new people when slavery was abolished (he himself equivocating between his identity group being the Igbo and English Christians).
I think assigning blame or thanks to Trump is a fallacy in itself. There’s not much the President can do here. The big things he can do were the travel bans, and he did those. Perhaps he could have been directly involved with whatever SNAFU went on with testing. After that, if it’s going to stop spreading, it’s because my county school board shut down our schools, and the NBA shut down their games, and my employer is letting us work from home, and because people do the social distancing thing and wash their hands. The President doesn’t have anything to do with that stuff. People are turning this into a political thing (on both sides) so they can dunk on the outgroup and I wish they wouldn’t. This is not the time.
Honestly the travel bans should have been faster and more extensive. Once it was known that there is a substantial dormant period that is the best way forward.
To a certain extent that’s true because the power here mostly lies with states (which they may have delegated to counties or smaller political units). That said there are significant levers at the federal level–they have exclusive jurisdiction over air travel for example. Then there’s just the bully pulpit. If Trump thought the country should shut down Italy style two weeks ago, he could have said so. Maybe people like my governor would then have not shut down just to spite him, but if so the blame would lie on my governor not Trump. (Assuming for the sake of argument that such a shutdown two weeks ago was the optimal move.)
You don’t need to have a lot of influence to be at fault, simply to do wrong thing, and Donald’s usual approach to problem is yet again bad. To copy paste a post from an american left wing, with my comment in italic
By contrast, what has Donald Trump, darling of the GOP, done?
1) Two years ago, fired the person in charge of pandemic readiness, and his team, and never replaced them.
That’s typical and 100% Donald Trump’s incompetence at hiring reliable people. Having this team would or should have help, this is a basic failure of his duty.
2) Cut the CDC’s global epidemic prevention budget by 80%.
Not sure if it is Donald Trump who decide that, but it is at least the reponsability of the GOP.
3) Kept testing catastrophically low. As of March 8, South Korea had tested 189,000 people; the US, 1700. Test kits are in short supply and test labs are backed up. When you hear that the US has had 971 cases (as of today), bear in mind that we just don’t know the total number of cases because we’re barely testing.
See above
4) Lied about the severity of the disease.
100% on Donald, but maybe more of a mistake thatn a fault
5) Lied about it being contained.
100% on Donald, and that’s a fault.
6) Encouraged people with the virus to go to work, spreading it further.
100% on Donald, and another fault.
7) Lied about the number of tests available.
100% on Donald
8) Lied that the coronavirus is just like “the flu.” Coronavirus’s mortality rate is about 20 times that of the flu. (The flu’s rate is 0.1%; WHO has estimated coronavirus’s at 3.6%. But in China, it was 14.8% for people 80 or older.)
I suspect that the claim in itself is wrong.
9) Misled people about how quickly a vaccine can be produced. (It could take a year or more.)
100% on Donald
10) Been more concerned about “the markets” and his own popularity than in combating a public health crisis.
The first one might be a debatable political choice, the second one is a judgement call.
Did he really mislead people about vaccination production time? He said a few months, but that was during a (live) meeting with advisors, who told him it would take much longer.
Did he talk about it some other time?
not to the best of my knowledge.
Please stop spreading lies and disinformation for partisan political purposes. You are not helping. You are spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in a time when people at least sort of need to not panic by thinking the government is more incompetent than usual. I hope this backfires on you massively and you lose whatever elections you are trying to win with this.
False. He got rid of a person on the National Security Council whose job, since the position was created in 2016, was to say at NSC meetings, “nope, no pandemic in the US.” None of this has anything to do with the CDC’s teams that deal with emerging pandemics.
False. He allowed funding to help deal with Ebola in Africa to expire. This has absolutely nothing to do with dealing with a novel coronavirus from China.
I stopped reading there, but I assume everything else you said is probably similarly false. You should ignore whoever fed you those talking points in the future.
For the first point, the source provided is an article from 2018, which corroborated his claims. Given your general lack of reliability, I will trust this more than you.
Given the way politics is done in the US currently, I can’t imagine anything that would make Trump’s opponents say he did a good job. If they decide that a good job was done, they’ll be handing the credit to any and every other plausible participant, from their (Democratic) governor to the heroic medical people in their local communities.
Of course much the same applies in reverse. His fervent supporters will give him credit for things done by other people. And those who feel that a bad job was done, will tend to divide the blame for that in equally partisan ways.
The small set of people who aren’t rabid partisans may manage a bit more nuance, but since they are mostly getting their news from partisan sources, maybe not. (Even my non-US news sources seem to be on a partisan mission to show the US as a bunch of bungling fools, and allow their local readers to congratulate themselves on being better off [with regard to Covid-19] at home than in the US.)
For the record, personally I don’t expect to have sufficient information to decide where to place responsibility, particularly if a good job is done. (It’s easier to assign responsibility for collosal blunders, than for making better choices repeatedly, particularly when no choice is really good.)
And of course some quantity of wingnuts are probably already accusing their favourite conspiracy theory targets of starting the pandemic on purpose, as well as arranging for it to be mishandled ;-()
I’ve seen a lot of recent discussion, here and elsewhere, about hospital bed count. The USA has a low bed count relative to other developed nations. Setting aside the potential impact of our capacity on the current pandemic, what is the explanation for this disparity? Can it be laid at the feet of our lack of universal coverage, or is it something else?
We have more healthcare workers per capita than most developed countries, so no, it’s not because we use less healthcare. Eastern Bloc counties had a suspiciously high number of hospital beds considering the generally primitive state of their medical sectors, presumably due to Goodhart’s law.
Italy uses an NHS-style government-run system, Servizio Sanitario Nazionale. Its ICU bed capacity is said to be 12.5 beds per 100,000 people. The USA has not quite triple that, and Germany’s “universal multi-payer” system has 29.2/100k.
This suggests that a government monopoly isn’t good for the ICU bottleneck during a pandemic. Universal access to a more market-y system might be better.
Perhaps less unnecessary hospitalization due to more attention to cost-effectiveness? In Europe, I’ve been hospitalized for more than a week in situations where I’m pretty sure that a one-day hospitalization would have been sufficient.
Given that the US spends much more money on healthcare and gets worse outcomes, it’s hard to believe it has more attention to cost-effectiveness.
It’s unclear.
• Some procedures may be more expensive in the US for reasons insurance companies can’t do anything about. However, they may be able to push for shorter hospitalizations.
• The effectiveness part of cost-effectiveness is not only health outcomes. If Americans are paying for private hospital rooms in place of many-bed wards, they are (depending on their preferences) getting value out of it that they wouldn’t get out of unnecessary hospital stays.
• The “worse outcomes” part is hard to ascertain. Some sources say it’s heavily confounded, and in any case it is based on metrics that capture only a part of health outcomes.
That claim is sometimes based on a WHO study. I critiqued that on my blog some years back. The ranking usually quoted includes cost, so isn’t just of outcomes, the ranking for outcomes is 15 (not the often quoted 37), and the measure of outcomes is based on five factors, only one of which is actually an imperfect measure of health outcomes.
Or in other words, the results of that study provide essentially no evidence on how good outcomes are. I’ve seen figures elsewhere on particular outcome measures, but nothing that would show the quoted claim to be either true or false.
Do you (Eric23) have a source for the claim?
The first result in Google.
As for your blog post – it’s more flawed than the study it discusses. First, because you just dismiss as irrelevant any of their calculations which are not explained to your satisfaction. Second, because you ignore that the US is #1 in subjective evaluation, and if you exclude that and look only at objective data, the US’s ranking must be lower than the #15 that includes subjective evaluation. Third, because being #1 in costs (by far) and #15 or worse in outcomes is pretty clear evidence of failure to contain costs.
Which is an article about cost, not outcomes. What I wrote in the comment you are responding to was:
Do you have a source for the claim that outcomes are worse in the U.S.?
I wasn’t talking about costs, as you could easily see by reading the comment you responded to. Your claim, which I was questioning, was that the U.S. “gets worse outcomes.” Do you have any evidence to support that claim?
What you refer to as “objective measures” are, with one exception, not measures of health outcomes, as you could see by reading my blog post or, if you don’t trust it, reading the notes to the WHO study that I link to.
Hospitals are dangerous. They are necessary because you cant wheel a surgical suite and a ct scanner into
someones home to treat them there, but best practice is literally to get you out of them as quickly as humanly possible, so in normal conditions, cost cutting and treatment optimization both push the number of beds down. I suppose optimal policy would be to let that happen and have moth-balled epidemic wards in an cheap location for when that tendency bites you in the buttocks.
Certificate of need laws certainly don’t help.
https://reason.com/2020/03/13/america-doesnt-have-enough-hospital-beds-to-fight-the-coronavirus-certificate-of-need-laws-are-one-reason-why/
Do the states without CON laws have appreciably more hospital beds per capita than the ones with them?
Not sure, but usual caveats would apply about confounders in either case. A better (though still imperfect) question would be how hospital beds per capita evolved in states who introduced CON laws after vs before that introduction.
Not sure about “hospital beds” but the US has the most ICU beds per capita by a significant margin. Germany is close, everyone else is substantially behind. The Uk is basically a third world country by that measure.
My anecdotal sense is that the US has fewer but better equipped (and more private) hospital beds, and hospital stays tend to be shorter. Probably both a cause and effect of their high price.
Wasn’t there a big push during the last 1-2 decades to convert the standard 2 beds per hospital room to all single bed rooms?
Also, to get people to use storefront “urgent care” clinics instead of hospitals when medically appropriate. And to close underused facilities.
Hospitals are expensive to maintain. Today, facing a pandemic, it looks like the wrong choice to have closed and downsized so many of them. But does it make sense to pay to keep them open and unused, waiting for a once-in-a-century event? Especially when many of them would be obsolete by the time the next pandemic rolls around.
The rhetoric seems rather inconsistent and disproportionate, for sure, though I think that is sadly normal in politics. But I think it is a mistake to take his earlier comments at face value. They served more of a symbolic or shorthand purpose–he believes in controlling borders, and a lot of people agree that something major is needed. He was also highlighting related social issues that people want dealt with–terrorism, crime, jobs, cultural change, globalism, China, sovereignty. A pandemic raises all of these issues, but it wasn’t a popular selling point. In many ways, his rhetoric has kept up with the earlier stuff–he’s banned flights even though some disagreed, and has kept going on about China, globalization, and jobs, and been somewhat aggressive in certain foreign policy situations. But how to deal with the virus domestically implicates a mostly different set of concerns, ones that he has not emphasized. You could say the same with Boris Johnson–fighting for English sovereignty and then saying the English people will have to deal with the virus because it can’t be contained. It’s not a question of what is more important or a bigger threat, but a question of who is in control. Protecting Americans from ourselves is just a different issue, rhetorically, symbolically, and otherwise.
It’s hard to measure illegal immigration’s alleged damage to the economy, because it benefits many people, especially in the short-term, and hurts people in harder to measure and indirect ways. It’s more the long-term shift towards cheap labor in general that is the problem, and this event will help push back on it. I expect the pandemic to do far more visible damage in the short-term, but the two issues may interact.
People who bought up quantities of hand sanatizers and such aren’t being allowed to sell them because of “price gouging” or possibly price gouging. So they’re just sitting on their stockpiles.
This strikes me as a pessimal situation. Suggestions for solutions?
If they don’t add a markup, then it shouldn’t be considered price gouging.
Right? This is why I don’t understand. It’s hard to believe he couldn’t still sell it and make money. It’s just that he can’t make as much money as he thought he could when he decided to buy them.
And even if he bought the sanitizer initially for some ridiculously high price himself, selling it at a loss is better than letting it sit in his garage. Better to make up some of your loss, rather than none of it.
The only scenario where he doesn’t want to sell it for a non-gouging price, is if he values just holding onto the sanitizer for more than that. In which case I can’t help him, that’s just a decision he is choosing to make, and he could make that same decision even without price gouging laws.
> This is why I don’t understand. It’s hard to believe he couldn’t still sell it and make money
Assuming we read the same article, it sounds like this is what he’s planning to do. The problem is that shipping hand sanitizer is uneconomical at non-extortionate prices (he claims it costs $10 for him to ship two bottles), so now he plans to sell them locally at a lower markup.
If rules against price gouging ban charging for shipping at cost, that seems like a mistake.
Shipping hand sanitizer two bottles at a time, is a mistake. Shipping is vastly cheaper at the wholesale than retail level; I think we had this discussion regarding cinderblocks a few months ago. If there are shortages of hand sanitizer, we want pallets if not TEUs of sanitizer shipped by train and truck to whichever Wal-Marts are running low this week, not some guy breaking up a pallet and trying to FedEx two bottles at a time to whoever will pay the most.
If we’re going to have laws against price gouging, that guy is the low-hanging fruit to be legally plucked for the common good. If we’re not going to have laws against price-gouging, then that guy is running at a loss from day one because the retail stores he’s buying from have already increased the price to the market-clearing level without charging their customers retail shipping rates on top of it.
For what it’s worth, I agree completely with you. I was just trying to answer Guy in TN’s question.
Adding for the sake of completeness: if, in the absence of anti-gouging laws, the guy is not running at a loss from day one, it can only be because his day one came earlier than other people’s, i.e., he was among the first to realize that there was going to be a surge in demand. In that case, his big shopping trip served the socially useful function of alerting the players in the normal supply chain to the situation, encouraging them to start raising prices and ramping up production.
I suspect our gouger may be exaggerating his shipping costs a bit to try and take some of the heat off. I don’t know whether it was possible to order hand sanitizer in retail quantities through Amazon back in normal times, but I do know you could get a bunch of other consumer items whose economics are not obviously different from those of hand sanitizer.
This is false for at least 2 reasons.
1. The 50th person who comes into to buy a bottle of hand sanitizer from Walmart is now in an environment where 49 other people have traipsed through, anyone of which could have contaminated a surfact that infects #50 before they even get to the sanitizer.
2. This is generally the central planning fallacy that hitting the average is better than hitting the specific. It is far better for people who are likely to have complications to get the sanitizer than for people who aren’t, the correlation with wealth/purchasing power here is about as good as you could hope for. Boomers have more wealth and should be the ones getting it (outside of hospitals etc), and they should also be avoiding super-stores like Walmart where they can.
Requisition. I mean US cops are already basically allowed to steal whatever they want as “evidence” so, might as well take advantage of that for a good cause once in a while.
I was going to say “send the cops to steal it” but you would have to make sure the cops turn it over to someone responsible, instead of hoarding it for themselves.
“Commence Eminent Domain“
Enforced low prices.
I read that and it filled me with rage. Beware toxoplasmas here.
Him complaining that price gouging is supposed to stop Billy Bob’s gas station, not him, really pissed me off. Besides the implicit insult about Billy Bob:
In the middle of a hurricane is exactly when you want price increases. In fact, the government should demand price increases. Take it entirely out of the gas station owner’s hands and insist that prices go up by $5/gallon. In the middle of a hurricane, you want people to conserve, and you want people to be incentivized to bring in new supply.
On the other hand, a guy with 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer has it because he bought it up off the market before other people could get it. The shortage is not because some hand-sanitizer-factory exploded or something: it’s because this asshole.
He should take his truck around again and start selling them for cash. This is how black markets traditionally work anyway.
I know the answer I’m supposed to give: legalize price gouging and let the markets clear. But that still leads to suboptimal scenarios by some metrics, like roughly what we’re seeing now – all the supplies get bought up by preppers and hoarders who don’t want to sell at any price, while retailers have bare shelves and I can’t buy anything even though I can afford the “inflated” price. Besides, it’s boring.
Maybe some kind of quota-based Dutch auction? The idea is, nobody can purchase more than their allotment. Tally up everyone’s bids, find the top N bidders where N is the maximum number of possible buyers given the supply and quota size, and sell to each of them at the lowest price in the top N. No hoarding, no “unearned” windfalls.
The people buying now are by definition not preppers. And as panicky impulsive hoarders, they are almost certainly at least somewhat price-sensitive. If they heard on TV that toilet paper is running out, saw empty shelves the last time they were at the store, and this time the shelves were freshly restocked at the normal price, they’re going to buy as much as they can carry because literally why not? Every signal and incentive points the same direction.
If toilet paper (or hand santizer, or rices and beans or whatever) costs twice as much as normal, they’ll whine and scream about the price-gouging but probably think a bit more about how much they want to buy. And the shopkeeper will think a bit more about how he might be able to get more TP on short notice (ditto the manufacturer, etc).
So, instead of one family getting a six-month supply at the normal price and two others going without, three families pay twice as much but get what they need. And yes, someone is going to bring up the plight of the poor people who literally can’t afford to buy any toilet paper if it costs more than normal, but A: that’s almost certainly not literally-literally, and B: if it is, someone goes without. But that’s what’s happening anyway, every time, and now it only happen in marginal cases.
Wouldn’t the price the auction would yield be roughly the same as what the price-gougers would get, unless perhaps you severely limit the personal allotment (and also prohibit its resale)?
Limiting personal allotment is the point of the auction format proposed by BBA. Prohibiting resale might be necessary on top of that (it certainly would be necessary in spherical cow economics land).
But there is a second benefit to running an auction, namely batching. By waiting for everyone’s bids to come in before you sell anything, you’re able to allocate the goods efficiently (i.e., the sum of buyers’ utilities is maximized), which might be very different from the allocation you get if you just sell to people as they show up, even if you dynamically adapt the price to the demand.
In the case of toilet paper, I would expect buyers’ values to decrease for each additional meter obtained, so the efficient allocation is that most people get some amount, which is exactly what we want.
The rules are simple. Don’t charge more than your competition, that’s gouging. Don’t charge less, that’s dumping. And don’t charge the same amount, that’s colluding. Other than that, you’re good to go!
I just want to point out, that if you care about this and think his hoarding is bad, then you intuitively understand that aggregated economic value does not equal aggregated utility. Congratulations on seeing the light.
So solutions?
-Instead of using price to ration the scarce supply, use something else, like a per-person allotment. Such laws were widespread in the US during WWII, hopefully we haven’t completely lost the knowledge/infrastructure necessary to implement them.
-Use state-run enterprises to create more hand sanitizer, selling it at a loss (or give it away for free). Fund it via taxation. This ensures that everyone who wants hand sanitizer gets some. And it floods the supply, removing the incentive for people to hoard.
I think the issue is that the markets are illiquid (you have to drive around to obscure stores to find the supply, which means high transaction costs). Standard economic theory only applies in proportion to how ideal the markets are.
I don’t think anyone ever claimed they were the same. Rather, the claim is that the policies you think follow from this will reduce both.
The record for state-run enterprises is pretty poor. Better to just subsidize production among existing manufacturers.
Re state-run enterprises: the State of New York is having its prison labor enterprise, Corcraft, produce hand sanitizer for governmental use. Worthwhile under current circumstances, but the mere fact that Corcraft exists is pretty distasteful, though I guess convicts have to do something while they’re in prison and somebody has to hammer out the license plates.
The thing people seem to overlook here is that there isn’t a shortage because the product is in higher demand than the logistic chain can provide. There is a shortage because a few individuals are deliberatedly ransacking the stores in order to get a monopoly on the product and then selling it at a highly inflated value, counting on the high demand, and this very behavior is creating the shortage – without this hoarding, there would be enough for everyone at normal (or slightly inflated) market price.
If you want to avoid shortages, then that kind of behavior should be discouraged/punished in some way.
The wannabe hand sanitizer kingpin is a three-sigma anomaly. There is a shortage because millions of people are opportunistically ransacking the stores so they can get the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that, in this uncertain and uncaring world, they’ve ensured that their family has a six-month supply of toilet paper.
I don’t buy that. This guy bought thousands of bottle, going through every single store he could find on a 1300 mile stretch of road. Even if only one people out of a thousand are doing that, make the maths yourself.
The guy in the article bought 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer for $1 each. In 2016 the hand sanitizer market was $195 million. Assuming that hasn’t changed (even though it almost surely has gone up), that would mean for hoarders to buy up half the stock you would need about 1,500 people buying 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer. I would guess that this guy is the only person that’s bought that many bottles, so in reality you;d need way more hoarders. It seems much more likely that the real “culprits” are the people that would have normally bought one bottle that are instead buying five or ten.
Math applied to numbers you made up out of thin air is literally worse than useless. What’s the evidence or other reasoned basis for one person out of a thousand doing that? I’d be surprised if it’s even one in ten thousand.
I’m pretty sure you’re mistaken– most of the buying seems to be a lot of people buying a small multiple of what they usually would, and keeping it for their own use. The supply chain can’t accommodate that in the short run.
Why are you assuming this?
A prepper with garages full of hand sanitizer selling over the internet will have <<50% of the market share. Unless you have a theory about them coordinating with one another, you’re not using the term “monopoly” correctly.
Price-gougers were speculating on an increase in the market price, but I don’t think any of them succeeded, or even tried, to corner the market and get a monopoly.
In the absence of laws (and public sentiment) against price-gouging, stores themselves could have increased prices when they saw the increasing demand, which would have reduced the profitability of hoarding.
If you don’t think the amount people would like to buy at normal prices exceeds the available supply, and you think the reason for inflated prices is someone cornering the market, why doesn’t the same also happen in normal times?
Well, the correct solution would have been for the prices to increase from the start, by a moderate amount. Aka allowing the big players to adjust prices on the fly. This would have the most chances of leading to a perfect equilibrium.
Let’s define “success” first, to make sure we don’t go astray. We want:
– quick increase production and distribution of those goods
– easier access for vulnerable populations
– a reasonably fair distribution
– (a distant last) least possible spending for that good, society-wide.
As far as I can tell, price gouging laws only optimize the last, and pretty much ensure the first three are shot to hell.
Rationing helps a bit with the third as well, but with horrible inefficiencies and bureaucracy.
Pretending to have price gouging laws and in practice having resellers buy from amazon/wallmart and selling on the black market is the absolutely worst scenario, and that’s what we have now. Not one success criteria is met.
Allowing and even encouraging walmart to adjust prices on the fly:
– makes sure the extra profits go to the distribution chain and the producers instead of scalpers, so solves the first criteria perfectly
– since prices go up fast, it discourages both stockpiling and reselling, so we end up with products like hand gels and masks being on the shelves non stop, albeit at 5x-10x the normal price – which may be “absurdly expensive”, but it’s still perfectly affordable for everybody, including vulnerable populations. With minimal need for charity in extreme cases.
– since we have both high prices and few shortages, it makes sense to buy only what you need – so as close to perfect distribution as we can
– there’s a lot of profit to be made by everybody in the production-distribution chain, so as a society we’re basically paying for extra supply extra fast. It’s not the best possible solution, at least in theory. In practice I can’t really think of a better one that doesn’t have chances of backfiring horribly (I still think of trucks full of bottled water untouched weeks after disaster passed).
“Pretending to have price gouging laws and in practice having resellers buy from amazon/wallmart and selling on the black market is the absolutely worst scenario, and that’s what we have now. Not one success criteria is met.”
The situation as described in the NYT article is the worst– people buying in the hope of reselling at high prices, and then not knowing how to resell when they don’t have access to the online markets. So, at the moment, there’s some quantity of hand sanitizer which is sitting in would-be resellers’ storage doing no good to anyone.
I’m tempted toward the government buying it from the resellers at what the resellers paid for it, so they aren’t tempted to hang on to it just in case.
Oh no, they’re … what was the word? Bragplaining? They’re definitely not in a bad position right now. There are many ways to get rid of it at a profit. They just lost a few of the easiest ones.
My first thought: Stores should realize “someone is buying up 500 items at once, wtf. We should restrict him to 10 and then mark up the price on the rest, because something is going on.”
But in some states, adjusting prices is hard, since each item needs to be individually labelled. Let those states sit, and others can dynamically price.
I’ve long said that instead of forbidding price increases, governments should go in the other direction and mandate price increases. People get pissed at stores for “gouging” but once the price increases are required, the stores can just shrug their shoulders.
In case of emergency, give people money. There’s some talk of just giving everyone in America a n-hundred-dollar check as an anti-we-just-shutdown-the-economy measure. Give them that, and if they really want hand sanitizer, they can buy it. Soap still works better if you have running water available. Because of the shortage, I’ve probably only used 4 squirts of sanitizer in the past week.
Three items, not ten, on all sanitizing and OTC cold/flu medication products at the Krogers here in Grove City, OH (an outlying bedroom community in the Columbus, OH metro area). I can pretty much guarantee some individual store managers will be smart enough (and have the will/initiative) to set limits in cases where Corporate doesn’t mandate it.
Mind you, at those Krogers that only means they’re almost completely out of those products.
Besides the obvious solution of repealing laws and policies against price-gouging, I doubt there is actually a shortage of the ingredients of hand sanitizer. There is a shortage of factory-made bottles of hand sanitizer. An enterprising store owner or pharmacist could just mix alcohol, water, hydrogen peroxide, glycerin and some thickening agent, and sell his own hand sanitizer.
Cost would be somewhat higher than when making it in a factory, but I think many price-gouging laws allow some room for increased costs. In some jurisdictions, one may need regulatory approval to make hand sanitizer, though I guess it would be legal if it’s made by a compounding pharmacy. Even if selling the mix as hand sanitizer would be illegal, a store could just stock the ingredients next to each other on a prominent shelf, and stick a printout of WHO’s hand sanitizer recipe on it.
I saw that the high-grade alcohol was also selling out.
https://twitter.com/Stop_Trump20/status/1239229261648662529
Their storage locker has been raided by the cops per orders of the Attorney General.
*QUICK EDIT*: Some news reports say he voluntarily donated them. Check later.
Stupid of them to have done it in a state with laws against price gouging, while there are some 16 US states without such laws. Actually, producers of products under shortage, too, could sell their entire production in states without price gouging laws, and speculators could buy any available products in states with price gouging laws, and sell them in states without.
So I had independently done a similar analysis to that of hls2003 downthread, of cost-benefit tradeoffs to pandemic mitigation/delay strategies given reasonable estimates of QALY value, and come to a similar conclusion. Namely, restrictive measures with economic cost amounting to low-mid single digits % of GDP are plausibly worthwhile iff they actually work very well, and nothing costing 10+% of GDP annually is plausibly worthwhile *even if it works*.
How might those of us who are less allergic than most to these cold equations go about persuading various levels of officialdom not to take 10+% GDP cost worth of restrictive measures? I’m worried in particular that a second infection spike after the loosening of round 1 of restrictions might produce panic that would lead people to irrationally support 10+% cost measures. Am I underestimating the degree to which people will chafe against long-term restrictions?
It’s hard to run the equations when the numbers on both sides are mostly guesswork. We don’t know the how bad the pandemic will be and we don’t know how bad the economic impact of any given measure will be. Also keep in mind that letting infection run rampant itself has a severe negative economic impact.
We don’t know, but we can estimate enough orders of magnitude to tell us something not-useless. Take, for example, the impact of China’s restriction measures on their economy over the last three months; I think we can reasonably assume that’s at least a 20% hit to their GDP over those three months, no? (If anyone has actual output numbers that would call this into question, I’d be interested to see them, of course.) So if that level of restriction were continued for six months, you’d have at least a 10% impact on annualized GDP.
Fair point that an absolute business-as-usual counterfactual would also have a significant negative economic impact. But there are plausible counterfactuals which would minimize economic impact by targeting only small subsets of the population (e.g. focus on isolating the most vulnerable and enforcing quarantines of the known-infected, but accept that a bunch of vulnerable people are going to die for lack of treatment availability anyway).
To clarify, what I’m worried about here is that the loudest voices will call for Italy-style whole-country lockdowns to continue throughout the year, including in the US; I think the social and economic breakdown this long a period of lockdown would cause is almost certainly severe enough to not be worth it, and I want to know how to argue for that in a way that is persuasive to ordinary people.
I don’t think it’s worth worrying what policy will look like months ahead when the facts on the ground change so quickly. If in two weeks, we’re worse than Italy, then you would look silly to advocate lifting the restrictions and vice versa.
The pandemic is spreading exponentially in the US. Either restrictive measures will be taken to reduce the exponent to less than 1, or it will spread until millions of people die.
The sooner the restrictive measures are take, the fewer cases there will be, AND the less restrictive the restrictions will need to be until containment is achieved.
So the choice is either a smaller restriction now, or a bigger restriction later, or no restriction and millions die. Pretty obviously the first choice is best.
Pandemic Pi Party – Virtual Meetup Today at 3 PM EST
Please join me for a virtual SSC meetup today at 3 PM Eastern.
The meetup will take place on Zoom – https://zoom.us/j/915512522
We will also use a complimentary Discord – https://discord.gg/nHhCxR
Please mute your microphones when you’re not speaking. Also, if you have a question for the person who’s speaking – post it on Discord, and if you want to just say something – jump in on Zoom.
So, what do you people make of the UK coronavirus strategy?
The uncharitable interpretation is that they are kicking the can, like they did with Brexit, because this is what the UK government does, but coronavirus is not the EU and won’t give an extension.
The charitable interpretation is that this is a galaxy-brain 4D-chess move to build up herd immunity in a “controlled” way: keep the schools, pubs, cinemas, etc. open so that people get infected, up until the NHS reaches capacity, then partially shut down things so that the number of new people requiring hospitalization balances the number of people leaving the hospitals (on their feet or in a coffin), and keep doing this for months until about 60% of the population has been infected.
In contrast, Italy’s (and Hubei’s) strategy of shutting down everything to slow down the infection as much as possible is argued to have the drawback that it would take a longer time to achieve herd immunity and full shutdown is not feasible in the long term.
Does the UK strategy make sense? My understanding is that Italy started to shut down the economy at a lower number of confirmed infections and still its health care system got overwhelmed, so if the UK waits until the NHS runs out of beds before starting to shut down the economy, then the NHS will end up being severely overwhelmed, possibly even more than its Italian homologue (the UK has less hospital beds per capita than Italy). Since the incubation length is 2-3 times the doubling time without restrictions, even if the number of new infections could be immediately reduced to zero, the number of people requiring hospitalization would still increase by a factor of 4 to 8.
Even if we assume that the UK government is not run by total innumerates and that they are trying to take this math into consideration, playing with exponentials sounds extremely risky: a slight error in your estimates and you are screwed.
Isn’t the Chinese and Italian strategy of maximum slow down more sensible? Full shutdown is not feasible in the long term but it might buy enough time for research to develop antiviral drugs or vaccines, or even just for the weather to become warmer.
I am currently in China and am very curious how things will play out once things start rolling again after the hard stop. There is a very strong desire from the people I am interacting with to get things back on track, but I am curious what the response will be if the virus starts spreading when everything does get moving again.
My understanding is that the hard stop only involves the Hubei province, while in the other provinces there are restrictions but most people still go to work/school.
Is this correct?
Hubei had the most restrictions, but where I am seems like the most extreme restrictions happening in other countries, the schools are still closed and everyone who can is still working remote, a lot of restaurants and stores never opened back up from the spring festival, and I can only get stuff from Taobao if it is manufactured/stored in my province.
If people don’t have the virus, they won’t infect others.
Just keep the isolation up until everyone with the virus (the ones the medical system doesn’t know about) has recovered or else worsened to the point of isolation in a hospital. Then there will be no cases “out there” and normal life can resume.
I suspect the necessary time for this is a month or two.
I suspect the necessary time for this is a month or two.
If there are 10,000 carriers, a “generation” is two weeks, and we drive R_0 down to 0.4, that’s just over 10 weeks, or 2.5 months.
I think it’s amazingly optimistic to think we can drive R_0 down to 0.4.
The number of cases in South Korea is dropping by 50% approximately every 5 days.
Of course that involves extensive testing and follow-up, requiring a level of government competence which the US may not be able to achieve.
I think it’s also the result of South Korea being full of South Koreans.
Thanks for the link. I hadn’t believed containment was really achievable. Maybe it is. . .
You basically answered your own question, I think: you see just as well as I do that due to the large number of undiagnosed cases and the lag from infection to hospitalisation, the 4D strategy would be madness. There is no way you can estimate correctly when the flood wave will hit and overwhelm your medical system and time a shutdown accordingly.
We don’t know.
I think the US is overreacting, but we don’t know how to properly respond. I can’t say what, specifically, our reaction should be.
My idea of purposefully infecting the young and healthy somewhere* early is something I like more and more, but people are too risk-averse to consider it. Maybe afterwards we can think about it.
Also, each time I hear that we are delaying the peak in order to wait for warming weather, I wonder: what if this were happening in late autumn? Would we be trying to pull the peak forward?
* A hotel that needs business, for example. Sounds like a fun experience for 20-somethings. Although would that hotel retain a stain as a “plague hotel” or something? zzzzort published a Vox piece on Bill Gates below, and one thing Bill Gates said was that we haven’t figured out how to make sure that people who go off to fight a disease (like a military reserve) get to come back to their jobs. This is something we need to plan before the next pandemic — and there will be a next one.
The major issues that people are raising aren’t going to be alleviated much by 10,000 (or 100,000 or a million) people with a 2 week course in changing bed pans.
Let’s say I waved a magic wand and gave 80% of the population aged 5-25 immunity. Not so much giving us workers, but that would give us some herd immunity and slow the transmission through the rest of society.
It would with a magic wand but not with intentional infection and quarantine for multiple weeks.
If I stuffed the 19-25 year olds who are packing into bars (because college went online, woohoo!) into hotels and gave them free condoms, how long would it take for the virus to burn through 80% of them? Two months?
The Gaylord National Resort & Conference Center (I chose that because it’s where CPAC was) has 2000 rooms at around $200/night. Squeeze 4 kids in each room. That’s $12 million a month to keep 16,000 of them out of our hair.
It looks like there are 30 million people in the US in that age-bracket, so that means 1875 groups of 16K, so $22.5 billion a month. (And most hotels are not sitting on the Potomac!)
Look, I know I am proposing something insanely expensive. But so is killing half our economy for a month. We should be considering other ways of isolating the young-and-stupid from the old-and-vulnerable.
Are you providing no medical care to this group? Who is supplying them with food? Cleaning these nasty places?
They are eating food right now. They are going to be eating food wherever they are. That is not an additional expense. Since they are all heaped up together food can be prepared in bulk. You can hire some of the more competent of the 19-25 year-olds to do basic things like cooking and cleaning and monitoring vitals. Some small fraction will become seriously ill, and you bring them to an ICU the same way you handle a 70-year-old with COVID-19 who becomes seriously ill.
No, they are not already eating catered food in a hotel right now, and its not the expense. Its the hundreds of thousands of service employees who have to take care of the millions of people you want to quarantine, and interact with the food deliveries, spreading the disease. It is the people who will sneak out to party/find drugs/out of just general boredom well before the quarantine is up. Here is a story of a man walking out of a quarantine area and walked into a store and boarded a public bus. He turned out to be negative for the virus, but he was only there a few days at the most before going on a walk about. If you don’t have armed guards willing to use force then quarantines aren’t going to work, even with them they shouldn’t be expected to work on this type of virus.
Most of those 19-25 year-olds aren’t eating meals cooked at home by mom and dad. They are eating take-out or sit-down meals at restaurants.
You can deliver supplies to the hotel, which has big kitchens on-site, and do it at scale.
Was the man that escaped quarantine put there against his will? I took it as obvious that I was dealing with volunteers. Even then, yes, you would probably need guards.
@Edward Scizorhands
You think most 19-25 year olds are eating out for 100% of meals? It probably isn’t even anywhere close to that.
A large chunk of 19-22 year olds are technically “eating out” at school dining options, but they paid for that up front when they bought the meal plan.
This seems like a really dumb strategy that’s equivalent to no strategy at all; that is, they’re going to get overwhelmed and any partial shutdowns will do effectively nothing.
I don’t think it’s the worst strategy, though: that would be “flattening the curve”. The problem with that one is that keeping up measures sufficient to keep ICU beds available until most of the susceptible population has been through the disease means a _very long_ period of restriction. I think some back-of-the-envelope numbers thrown around have been in the 10-year range. Thus you’ll get the worst of both worlds: a long and expensive partial shutdown of the economy, followed by uncontrolled outbreak ANYWAY when you cannot take it any more.
The Chinese and Korean strategies seem to have resulted in R0 < 1; that’s the outcome you want. Either attempt to actually stop the epidemic, or bite the bullet. “Delay” strategies only make sense if you have good reason to expect something else to stop it in the short term (e.g. if it really is seasonal, or you can pull a vaccine out of a hat)
The problem with containment is that the virus is everywhere by now. So even if you manage to trace all cases in your country, someone will bring it back in next week. And since it seems to be just a cold for many young people, good luck tracing it in the first place.
We are probably expecting to have a vaccine or an effective therapy by the end of this year. We probably can’t afford to confine people to their homes until then, but what else can we do at this point? If we just let the virus run rampant, hospitals will be overwhelmed in at least some regions for sure.
> but what else can we do at this point
People capable of activities of daily living self-isolate for the next few months or so. And the ones who aren’t independent die, significantly cutting overall healthcare costs.
If every country will choose to either let the disease run rampant, or shut down everything and push R₀ well below 1, then the epidemic will be over everywhere in a few months (either because of herd immunity or because of R₀<1), and there is nowhere to bring back cases from. We are in trouble if R₀≈1 in some place, because it will go on for a long time there.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what is actually an optimal strategy here, I don’t think anyone actually does and all the models being used are wildly incomplete. This is just a steel-man attempt at the potential benefits of the strategy.
One of the big risks for China is that as they attempt to ramp up their economy again they see a downstream collapse in demand as the Western world goes into slowdown/shutdown/recession. The early stages of the illness saw Western countries shifting as much of their supply chain away from China as they could (at least in the short term) so some demand has just been lost there, and if we get a serious recession now that is more demand shortfall while they are trying to ramp up. Avoiding the worst of the virus but getting the worst of the recessionary forces on both ends is a scary prospect.
On the flip side being one of the last major economies open for business might give you some tail winds, and may give a competitive advantage to GB. Lower input prices can sometimes be turned into longer contracts at below (future) market prices, and supply chains that are formed now can produce benefits for a long period of time and delaying the shutdown could plausibly reduce long term government debt (relative to shutdown countries) which can weigh on growth.
Growth here is pretty important, if there is not a major seasonality issue + people can reinfect easily what does China do if there is another outbreak? Can they realistically go full quarantine again? The worst case scenario isn’t ‘do nothing, it ravages your country’ its ‘do something dramatic and at high cost and it comes back and threatens to ravage your country anyway’.
I’m still watching the UK broadcast, and they say that by their models cutting off travel from China would only have delayed the onset of the epidemic only by a day or two.
I have said, repeatedly, that I think America’s travel ban bought us a month. Maybe I was completely wrong on that. They said they would need 95% elimination of people coming from China to the UK — and they thought they could only get 50%, considering all routes. It’s possible the US has better border control, just because of geography.
(Separately: I like that Boris Johnson led off by saying that we are going to lose some of our family members before their time. And there was no panic.)
You missed one. Malice.
The tories hate the NHS, by not doing containment at all, the NHS is guaranteed to be spectacularly overwhelmed, which can be used as an excuse to sell it for parts, and also a bunch of pensioners will die, saving money that can be used for tax cuts.
Is there any evidence of civil servants in a democratic country ever actually making these kinds of decisions? The closest things I can think of was the plan to get the U.S. in to WWII with a false-flag attack from the Japanese, but that was never actually executed.
I’m not sure what counts as “these kinds of decision;” I guess I’m just asking, shouldn’t our prior for this specific explanation be infinitesimal?
Especially since going down this path would almost certainly lead to more blame being put on the Tories than the NHS, since people will blame who’s in charge.
Ehrlichman:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
More relevantly, Brexit itself was horrifyingly against the best interests of the people of the united kingdoms, and the Tories damn well knew that.
an old man bitter about getting throw under the bus by nixon is perhaps not the most reliable of sources.
First, I think that’s far from obvious. More importantly, though, the tory leadership was almost uniformly anti-brexit. They called the referendum in the hopes of shutting down the brexit debate forever. So you can accuse them of a lot of things, but foisting brexit on the country is not one of them.
> They called the referendum in the hopes of shutting down the brexit debate forever
My impression is that Cameron was worried about losing support to the UKIP, and so he promised the referendum in order to boost his chances of election, confident that the referendum would never actually pass anyway. It was just a political stunt gone horribly wrong.
@loriot
I think we’re saying the same thing, or at least things that are compatible. cameron was against brexit and he wanted to shut up the brexiters who were also threatening his premiership. he was confident that the referendum would fail and then for the next decade or so, any political movement that was pro-brexit could be told “shut up we already voted on this.”
If your theory-of-mind of your outgroup has them doing things internally incoherent, start over.
If anyone told me Obama was deliberately letting Ebola in the country to destroy private insurance and install single-payer, I would say “okay” and then turn the channel away from Infowars.
Oh, I dont think this likely, but I in general try to apply both sides of Hanlons Razor. That is, when incompetence is not a plausible explanation it is time to check for malice.
Firstly, no they don’t.
Secondly, Boris Johnson is probably the most economically left-wing Conservative PM since the pre-Thatcher days, so he’s hardly the sort of person to want to kill off the elderly to free up money for tax cuts or whatever bizarre conspiracy theory you’ve convinced yourself of.
Given that the number of cases in the UK is increasing by 40% per day, this is nonsense.
Massive social adjustments are needed even to decrease that 40% to 10% or whatever would be necessary to “slow” the spread. And if you’ve already got it down to 10%, why not get it down to -10%. You’re already most of the way there in terms of economic impact. And at 10% growth you need to institute these measures indefinitely, at -10% growth you can remove them once the pandemic is gone.
An R_0 of 0.9 takes 21.8 generations to drop one order of magnitude.
I didn’t say R0 of 0.9, I said 10% decrease in cases per day. At that rate, the case rate would be decreased by 90% in about three weeks. South Korea is achieving a better rate than this right now.
We moved from Brexit to coronavirus, but the structure of the discourse somehow remained the same. This is either a 4D-chess move or the ordinary stupidity; people have strong opinions in both directions; and the convincing data will only be available in the future.
As long as the other side can refrain from calling them geniuses, I promise to refrain from calling them idiots. (Applies to both Brexit and coronavirus.) No one is going to convince the other anyway.
I don’t know anything specific about the UK’s response to the coronavirus, but I do know that boneheaded stupidity is far more common in general than 4D-chess genius.
That would be uncharitable, and also wrong. The government didn’t kick Brexit down the road because “this is what the UK government does”, but because Parliament was majority anti-Brexit and wouldn’t vote for any leave agreement. Note that, after the election when the government’s hands were no longer tied like this, it started moving much more quickly regarding the EU.
Sars2 statistics: Why are absolute numbers given everywhere?
I can get that it gives info about “IT IS HERE!!!” in the very early stages, but in a roughly exponential spread phase, numbers relative to the population would be much more informative.
I’d like to see, for examples (whenever such numbers are available, and, maybe even credible),
“(estimated) infected per thousand”, (e)IpT,
“tested per thousand”, TpT (or rather, for now, “…per million”, TpM),
“positive tests percent”, Pt%
“severely ill per thousane”, SIpT,
“in/requiring intensive care per million”, ICpM,
“dead per million”, DpM,
“cured per million”, CpM.
The news and websites I saw don’t use relative numbers; I guess I am missing something very basic, something Chesterton-fencey?
Maybe one reason is that the relative numbers are often pretty small. The website I just checked, for example, told me that there have been 2340 cases detected in the US, which is 0.00007% of the population. People can’t really get an intuitive feeling for the difference between that and, for example, the 0.007% we’d expect if there’s actually 100x as many cases as we’ve detected.
True, but I guess because “percent” is to big to be a useful unit. But “per million” would work: 0.7 pm detected and 70 pm suspected, that is understandable. Or 7 vs 700 “per ten million”.
(And surely someone will joke about “micro-people”, and the catastrophe of the “infected milli-people”.)
Advantages of “per million” include comparing different populations. (For example, right now, New York has 27 pm detected cases, whereas California has 6.7pm, so as a whole California is actually doing a little better than the US average.)
Disadvantages include trying to figure out the right denominator to use. (For example, right now, 183 of California’s 265 detected cases are in the Bay Area, which is giving us around 24 pm, so what I said above is kind of misleading.)
But using absolute numbers because denominators are hard isn’t helpful either, and has the same disadvantages.
Maybe people who aren’t good with numbers become suspicious when they see the above happening. They intuitively feel that someone is trying to slip something past them, but can’t tell what or how.
Maybe trying to give useful numbers is considered bad in a Copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics kind of way. If you just give the absolute numbers, well, you can’t be blamed for not doing any calculations at all. If you try give numbers that correct for population, then you’re doing statistics, which we all know is worse than damned lies, and if you don’t do a perfect job then you’re to blame for misleading people.
Disadvantages include trying to figure out the right denominator to use. (For example, right now, 183 of California’s 265 detected cases are in the Bay Area, which is giving us around 24 pm, …
Yeah, it may be necessary to state the ‘resolution’, i.e., being very clear of what area/community is meant.
Maybe trying to give useful numbers is considered bad in a Copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics kind of way. If you just give the absolute numbers, well, you can’t be blamed for not doing any calculations at all. If you try give numbers that correct for population, then you’re doing statistics, which we all know is worse than damned lies, and if you don’t do a perfect job then you’re to blame for misleading people.
Given the state of political debate, that may be the best explanation: ass-covering.
This site gives the stats you’re asking for:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
For entertainment or inspiration: Cory_Doctorow’s When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: text, podcast
(homepage)
Third Mar-a-Lago guest tests positive for COVID-19.
I am so angry. How can Conley not be stripped of his license for not comprehending the epidemic risks associated with the fact that COVID-19 incubates for up to 14 days before the infected has symptoms?
So if President Trump isn’t responding appropriately, what’s Joe Biden’s plan?
Well, crap. I guess it’s reassuring to know that containment would have been completely bungled by either Party, just with different motivations?
Nothing about locking down epicenters of the disease like metro Seattle, but he remembers to say “Acts of racism and xenophobia against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community must not be tolerated.”
To be fair, buried deep there is mention of some stuff that actually would save lives, like surveillance. But mostly it seems uncomprehending of how the highest priority is containment/mitigation, how sclerotic bureaucracy (the CDC and FDA) would have also prevented a Democratic administration from testing enough people, and how a ruler can’t just declare enough oxygen intubation/whatever life-saving bottlenecks into existence the same day just by believing in Big Government more than his opponent.
A simple number of overwhelming medical capacity:
The United States has some 45,000 ICU beds, and even in a moderate outbreak scenario, some 200,000 Americans will need intensive care.
I can just imagine a Clinton administration’s response. Lots of heavy-handed messaging against racism, Hillary doing lots of photo ops in Asian communities, maybe even going to China to show there’s nothing to be afraid of, blue Twitter going wild with the YASSS SLAY KWEEN… and a couple of months later President Kaine or Ryan is imposing martial law.
(I don’t think Hillary herself is that wokeness-addled, but everyone who’d be planning her strategy certainly would be.)
I realise the crisis is mostly out of the president’s hands, but Trump (or Biden, or, contra the poster above, Clinton) could have countermanded the CDC when it decided not to use the WHO-approved coronavirus test. The sclerotic bureaucracy is what it is, but you can make a decision to bypass it.
There are lots of Presidents that would have used “well, there was red tape, what could I have done?” as an excuse, but Trump is the last one I’d think would have done it. He’ll bulldoze over rules and customs at will, but not this time?
On the other hand, he also seems the only one who was willing to cut off travel from China. I remember during the Ebola scare that Obama seemed unwilling to even (comfortably!) quarantine returning health care workers, something I still don’t understand.
Never a convincing defense coming from the head of the executive branch, but it would be especially irrelevant in this case: there was no “red tape” standing in the way of a decision to use the WHO test like most other countries on the planet.
We don’t know why the WHO test wasn’t used.
But the red tape I had in mind was for things like not having proper IRB clearance for the people who were involved in the flu study consenting to be part of a coronavirus study. “Yes, that is a very good point, and we will now ignore it. Anyone have a problem with this? Here is the microphone where you can talk to the American public about why we should not have testing.”
My best guest would be fear of appearing unpatriotic.
Have we used WHO tests in the past, or is making our own the SOP?
Making our own is SOP. But then, SOP for the United States Navy is to use its own aircraft carriers. When we temporarily ran out of working aircraft carriers in 1942, Nimitz and Roosevelt had no qualms about asking the British if we could borrow one of theirs for a few months.
Sometimes your O isn’t S. If you’re not prepared to adapt, what the hell do we need you in a command position for in the first place?
Not eliminating the White House officials responsible for pandemic preparedness team might have helped.
Or it might not have. If President Biden fires the Heads of Memes and in 2023 a wild meme kills 10% of the country, it doesn’t mean the Heads of Memes would have made a difference.
What you say is very plausible, and it also makes horrible optics that Trump’s political opponents would be stupid not to use. But what actual difference is there? This is the second time I’ve asked. (Not the second time I’ve asked you, though.)
I have a question for the people who think it’s Trump that is the problem:
What exactly do you think is happening in the rest of the world?
Why should Joe Biden have a plan for this, any more than he has a plan for e.g. defeating the Nazis? By the time Biden is in a position to implement any plan he might have, the pandemic will either be over and done with or something unpredictably different than it is now.
He could say “Here’s what I would have done if I’d been President in December 2019 (or 1939)”, but at this point that would be so tainted by hindsight that nobody would take it as an indication of superior crisis-management skills.
Well yes, on one level it bespeaks cluelessness to spend time writing up a plan when you can’t have any government authority until early November (and only the tiniest and most informal until Jan 20 2021) and we’re as little as 14 days behind Italy.
On the other hand, he’s basically won the Democratic primaries and could potentially save lives by saying to his audience like a shadow government in the least partisan way possible (not very, I know) “The federal government is being grossly negligent. I encourage all Americans to avoid buildings other than their home, supermarket, pharmacy and workplace IF you can’t work from home. If sworn in as your next President, I will address your economic hardship and your children missing school after the crisis.”
We may have reached a crisis point where undermining the unpopular President in the direction of “quarantine yourselves as much as possible even if you feel well” could be a net benefit.
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1vOxwoPbMrRxB is part of a speech Grandpa Joe made. I watched clips but can’t summarize.
Trump selects people who are willing to say insane things about his health:
– Dr. Harold Bornstein, Trump’s former doctor. Bornstein later said that Trump had dictated the quote to him.
– Dr. Sean Conley, Trump’s current doctor.
– Dr. Jerome Adams, Trump’s surgeon general and a fit 45-year-old man.
It’s hard to tell whether they are incompetent or too weak willed to say anything that would annoy the president.
Perhaps Dr. Bornstein cheated on his taxes, saw what happened to people who stood by Trump like Michael Cohen, and decided the smart thing to do was stab the traitor in the back.
I run a tourist flight operation with aircraft in the 5 to 13 passenger range. We have no confirmed virus cases on our island of 400,000 people.
How should we be disinfecting our aircraft between flights? I see here that coronovirus could last up to nine days on surfaces. Or it could be 48 hours. And high temperatures could kill it: “But some of them don’t remain active for as long at temperatures higher than 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius).”
It is still pretty warm here so the easiest thing for us would be to stick a fan heater in the planes between flights and crank up the heat to 30 or even 50 degrees. Would this work? How long would it need to be at those temperatures?
Would it be possible to buy a 55-gallon drum of concentrated benzalkonium chloride, dilute it down 150:1, and just hose down the interior of the plane between flights in addition to the heat treatment?
I think it’s a more heat = better kind of situation. The more heat, the faster the proteins that the virus needs to do its thing bend out of shape, the greater chance that any individual virus particle is dead after a given duration, the lower the chance of infection from people touching surfaces and then their face/food after a given duration.
So, get it as hot as you can, it will probably help, but don’t think it’ll sterilize the plane. You may well be better off just taking the time to have someone wipe all the surfaces people touch with their hands with disinfectant wipes.
I’ve done some research on this so I can answer.
If you are doing heat, 90 minutes at 56 degrees C or 30 minutes at 75 degrees C, will deactivate the similar SARS coronavirus. COVID-19’s virus, SARS-COV-2, should be similarly vulnerable.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14631830?dopt=Abstract
You can also try any of the cleaners in the EPA’s list:
https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-registration/list-n-disinfectants-use-against-sars-cov-2
I thought of something incredibly stupid, and then I went and checked, and found out that not only was I not the first person to think of this, someone actually acted on it. Apparently someone bought the domain name slutstarcodex.com, but as of now they haven’t done anything with it, and if you visit the url Go Daddy offers to let you attempt to purchase it.
Honestly, whether or not the domain name had been taken, I think I might have posted here simply to have the chance to spread the irrational glee I feel when I think of this url, but since it still exists in the realm of boundless possibility, I put it to you: in an ideal world, what comes up when you type http://www.slutstarcodex.com into your browser and hit enter?
God, yes. This makes my stalk hard. Count this polypodiopsid in for some of your “irrational glee.”
In an ideal world, this link would host a camgirl (or rotating cast thereof) who wear sexy Scott masks and read posts from Scott’s writings in ASMR voices. That’s not very inventive, but I’ve just had a marathon fertilizer session and I can barely stay rooted.
Have a Slut of Gratitude from my menagerie, for giving us all horrible thoughts.
Kinda like Naked News, but for SSC articles.
I gotta ask, as I so rarely have the opportunity to converse with a sentient canyon fern, how do you type?
My favorite misspelling that I always to is slatetsarcodex.com. In Imperialist Russia, blog reads you!
The Fire Of My Loins: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of Emmanuelle
OT 136: Gropen Thread
[ACC] What Are The Benefits, Harms, And Ethics Of That Thing You Do With Your Tongue?
All of the posts are written by Scott Alexundr
The governor has ordered all the theaters to close. This sounds like a sentence out of 18th century New England (or would if they had allowed any theaters to open there to begin with) but it’s 21st century New York. Here is the order, complete with ornate Gothic-style letterhead.
It is not entirely clear how the order can be enforced. Neither the order nor the enabling legislation (a law passed by the state legislature on March 3, which feels like an eternity ago) specify any penalty for violation. The state health department will be enforcing it, and the department is empowered by the Public Health Law to make similar orders to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, but many sections of the PHL explicitly do not apply to the City of New York, whose local health department is separately authorized by the city charter. (For example, birth and death certificates are issued by the city health department and not by the state health department, which issues them in the other 57 counties.) So far all the theaters and other gathering places are abiding by it voluntarily. It’s likely that the legal basis for the order will never be challenged.
I repeat: The theaters are all closed, by the governor’s order, and nobody’s going to challenge it. Let that sink in.
To anybody who isn’t an NYC resident, this seems significantly less weird than I think you think it is.
I remember the film Shakespeare in Love addressing the responsibilities of the Master of the Revels, which included shutting down revels when necessary for epidemiology. It’s treated about as sympathetically as him scolding the people who work at the Globe for letting women play women’s roles (“unshamefacedness!”).
(1998 feels like an eternity ago. If Hollywood used Shakespeare’s work as the basis of a romantic “biopic” now, it would use the Sonnets to depict him as in a love triangle with a trans Fair Youth and a Dark Lady who’s transphobic due to internalized misogyny.)
This is what I was getting at. If there isn’t a plague, closing the theaters is a very Puritan thing to do, from Cromwell banning all public amusement to the extremely broad definition of “obscenity” used by the Boston Police well into the 20th century.
New York is many things, but Puritan it ain’t.
OK, per your request, I let it sink in.
Can you explain more about why this seems so strange to you? To me, everything about the coronavirus response feels a bit surreal, but closing public gathering places seems no more so than any other measure being taken by lots of places.
Personally, I don’t find the content of the EO particularly strange. Movement and gathering restrictions are like the basic response to an epidemic. By JHU, the State of New York has four times the number of active COVID-19 cases that Poland has and we have similar restrictions. Actually, ours are somewhat more far-reaching, if a bit late.
What gets me is the form of the document, with the curly writing, WHEREAS, THEREFORE, FURTHER, GIVEN, Privy Seal and everything. It looks like something out of a sovereign citizen’s wet dream to my European eyes.
By way of comparison, here’s what I’m used to when it comes to law-making documents (this particular one is a regulation of the Minister of Health, regarding financing of medical services for the purpose of preventing COVID-19). The form is clean and nicely understated and the text is simple and no nonsense (non-speakers will have to take my word for it, though).
Liability cascade. Nobody wants their theater to be responsible for spreading the virus.
That or a fear cascade.
I suspect the rational response is:
1. for very large or for crowded events: shut them all down
2. for moderately large and uncrowded events: shut down 50% of them.
(That “50” figure is not exact. It might be as low as 25 or go up to 80.)
But we have, at this point, no rational way of deciding a fair way of choosing which 50% stay open. And the people in charge aren’t sure which side they’d want to be on — do you get a bailout? Do you get a bailout only if you are ordered? Would it be nicer to sit home and still get paid? Or from the other side maybe you really want to keep going.
So we’ve lost the middle ground. No one wants to be the tallest blade of grass sticking out from the rest.
After this is over, we need to figure this out for next time.
I just want to take this opportunity to point out how journalism — stop your groaning! — how journalism imitates the form of orders like this. I said stop groaning! Both the government and the journalism use this form because it looks official. It somehow announces itself as important and inherently worthy of respect. It is part of the visual language of authority.
Ducking back out now before I get hit with a flying bottle.
Today in ‘Things that have only just occurred to me’ – did anyone else realize that the way conductors indicate measures (in common time, anyway) is the same motion as crossing onesself? Given who did most of the really excellent early composing and for whom, I can only imagine this wasn’t an accident.
On the one hand, it’s a really fits our intuitions nicely.
On the other, if you’re beating out 4/4 time, you really want to have an unambiguous hand movement for each beat, because you can’t be sure that ol’ Bill on the ‘bone in the back row was paying attention until right now.
Historically, conducting took a while to develop to its present form. As late as the 17th century the way a way of keeping time was to wave a big stick up and down, which is all fun and games until someone puts it through his foot and dies of gangrene.
Modern conducting technique wasn’t really developed until the 19th century or so. Berlioz’s The Orchestral Conductor: Theory of His Art (part of the Treatise on Instrumentation, added in 1855) still holds up pretty well in terms of outlining the conductor’s role and its execution, I think. Even if you don’t read French, just looking through the images will give an indication of how intricate the gestures can get for various time signatures.
By this time, the connection between music and religion was much looser than in, say, J.S. Bach’s time. The various people involved may well have been privately religious and it isn’t totally inconceivable that the crossing yourself gesture was ingrained enough in the collective consciousness to influence the development of conducting technique, but I expect it is simply a coincidence stemming from the fact that a cross has four points.
IIRC although clergymen were used for this purpose it has nothing to do with the modern conductor’s crossing-oneself signals. Times were communicated digitally, as in with a number of fingers.
At many water stations, the water was provided by a tank pond which often had fish or other impurities. Fish in the boilers could be a real problem: the ‘crossing oneself’ motion was used by the boilerman to let the conductor know that the water had been inspected and was clean (like holy water).
I don’t see it. The common school now is that the baton/hand actually hits the same location for each beat (no variations in the vertical or horizontal), so the closest to the crossing is only for 3/4 (4/4 has an extra loop to the conductor’s right, as well as returning to the center for beat 4), and there’s never a beat at the head.
(And having variations in the vertical or the horizontal axes makes for bad times for the players, speaking from experience.)
There’s a thread buried too deep for responding to be convenient. I find I want to respond.
So I’m reposting this from nkurz as a more convenient starting point.
@nkurz
This is the comment that caused me to want to respond, and to do so with enough space that we could manage considered responses. It suggests I might find new data in this exchange, if only just enough to figure out where our ideas of “acceptable behaviour” diverge.
At the time, I believe opinions were pretty much lined up by political affiliation, much like the recent impeachment – to one lot, the behaviour was self-evidentally illegal, and also meaningfully wrong, and to the other it was a tempest in a teapot drummed up for political effect – either it never occurred, or it wasn’t illegal, or it was a mere technicality that should be legal, or folks on the other side routinely did the same thing with impunity; possibly all 4 at once.
The “of course” here referred on the one hand to the likelihood of any politician keeping their campaign promises (low, IMO), and on the other hand to the fact that I was upset by a threat that turned out to have no teeth to it, rather than by the victors actually jailing their opponents.
The elite – of all political stripes – routinely get away with things that would get mere mortals in trouble. But that wasn’t where I was going. In general, I tend to favour not prosecuting politicians for relatively minor offenses, because it’s too easy for that to become a way for the party in power to silence their opponents, enforcing rules that are usually ignored and/or simply manufacturing evidence. But this seems to be a case of sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander – I’m sure if we asked, we could get people on both sides to post a dozen instances of their opponents doing terrible things which they never should have gotten away with.
Nope, this was a visceral, emotional reaction – those fans were baying for blood, and that both shocked and frightened me. And AFAICT Trump was encouraging it.
This may be a (sub)cultural difference; I see some amazing viciousness in e.g. posters in sales offices apparantly intended to encourage “our” salespeople to outsell their competition, not to do what the posters actually depict. (E.g. a football tackle, that looked likely to cause serious injury.) And some sports fans seem to go for similar chanting – OTOH, some of them also destroy stadiums and battle the opposing team’s fans to the point of arrests and serious injuries.
I also could not see any reason why they wouldn’t be equally ready to turn on me (by category; I’m not a famous public figure), and why Trump wouldn’t encourage them to do so. There had already been a lot of rhetoric about “elites” (= anyone who can get an undergraduate degree? = anyone who can accurately describe the scientific method?), foreigners, and folks who live on the US coasts. I’m resigned to financial attacks with targets like these, but this felt like a statement in favour of both legal attacks and mob violence.
Note the feeling language above – their behaviour made my amygdala expect them to attack me physically. My left brain can make a more nuanced assessment of the likelihood of that actually happening. But that doesn’t change my amygdala’s opinion.
Thanks for reposting and responding. I think I agree with almost everything you say in the response. I’m also terrified of mob behavior, and occasionally am enough of a nonconformist that I can easily see myself on the wrong side of one. If I were to quibble, it would be to reiterate that (many within) the mobs’ behavior wasn’t because they felt Clinton had wronged Trump, but because they felt she was trying to get away with doing something morally and legally wrong. You are likely right that Trump tried to direct the crowd in self-interested ways, but I don’t think defense of Trump was a driving force for (many of) the participants.
I’m also not sure if the political division in attitudes maps to Democrat vs Republican as clearly as you suggest. I supported Sanders in 2016, ended up voting for Jill Stein, was very offended by Clinton’s behavior, and have probably become more biased since then. I was interested enough to read all the previous transcripts of the depositions in the case, and concluded that Clinton must be lying about her lack of recollection in many of her answers. I think the judge in this case has reached the same conclusion, and is hoping to pillory her for it.
> But that doesn’t change my amygdala’s opinion.
I wonder if a difference is that I get most of my news from print sources, listen only occasionally to radio (which is almost always NPR), and other than occasionally passing through airport terminals, I watch very little video news. As a result, I probably have less of a limbic response.
FWIW I am fairly apolitical, It seemed to me at the time, and now, that both perspectives are reasonable except in as much as they think the other perspective is ridiculous. The difference between ‘illegal’ and ‘technicality that should be legal’* seems big in outputs but small in inputs.
*I picked this one of the four because it is the only one I heard, although I don’t actively follow the news so I might have come into it late in the new cycle after the first two stopped being common positions. The 4th is something I pretty much only heard in reference to other people doing this and not getting away with it. I get most of my news from NPR when I get it.
This is your regular reminder that the trouble “mere mortals” normally get into for doing what Hillary Clinton is to be fired from their government or government contracting job and put on the list of people to never get such jobs in the future. Hillary Clinton “got away” with it in the sense that she was turned down for the government job she was then applying for and is exceedingly unlikely to get such a job in the future.
The cries of “lock her up!” were the result of a populist demagogue demanding that his political opponents be given extra special punishment for being his political opponents. The people making such cries deserve to have all their future political champions subject to the same strict scrutiny and draconian enforcement, which in the land of three felonies a day(*) means having basically every non-RINO Republican who ever dares run for office, locked up and made ineligible to run for office. Have fun with that.
The rest of us, don’t deserve that, and we wish you all would knock it off. There’s a reason we have a norm of prosecutorial decisions being made by hopefully apolitical civil servants with zero input from elected officials, or chanting crowds with overactive amygdalas, and if we’re going to do away with that norm I want the cost to fall 100% on the people breaking it. But I’d rather not go there at all.
* Not literally true, but close enough for this purpose.
I do not believe this is true. For merely mishandling classified documents, like accidentally taking a few home or something, fine, maybe that’s true. But for setting up an entire alternative email server so she can systematically remove reams of classified materials from secure networks and dodge federal record keeping laws…no. If a mere mortal did that they would get way more than fired from their job. They would go to jail.
Those are two different things; the people who get fired and blacklisted for mishandling classified information aren’t being let off easy because, hey, at least they followed federal recordkeeping laws while they did so.
Taking “reams” of classified information off the classified servers so you can work from home, normally gets you fired and blacklisted. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that it matters whether the personal computer you then store it on is a “server”; that makes no difference in practice and shouldn’t make any difference under the law.
The server was for evading federal recordkeeping requirements, which is illegal whether the records are classified or not. It is AFIK exactly as illegal whether the information is classified or not. And I’ve never heard of anyone being imprisoned for it, only fired.
If you’re going to claim that a specific combination of crimes each of which normally gets someone fired, would have gotten a normal person imprisoned but Crooked Hillary got a break, then I’m going to be extremely skeptical and you’re going to want to find a case where a normal person was in fact imprisoned for that combination of firing offenses.
@John Schilling
There is sandy berger, who did face criminal charges. But there’s also the sheer size of clinton’s violation. She didn’t just take some papers home, she took the email correspondence of the entire senior state department.
Sandy Berger wasn’t locked up; he got two years’ probation. And the number of documents is largely irrelevant; it’s the motive that matters. One document that you’re planning to send to Russia, gets you locked up. Your entire department’s files because you didn’t know what you’d need to work from home, gets you blacklisted. A nominal conviction with no jail time is a common way to implement that.
Berger paid a $50,000 fine and had two years of probation, and he was definitely more than a “mere mortal”.
This seems to say that Trump riled up his voters and that they are wrong for being so riled. However it is unclear to me if they are supposed to be wrong because they believed the politician they intended to vote for or because they are aware that their cries are totally spurious?
If the former, well okay, if the latter, I disagree.
One of Trumps campaign slogans was drain the swamp for a reason. He was appealing to people who thought the political elite are a problem. Your own framing of what actually happened, seems to be(I admit I am not sure here), that the political elite do this all the time and never get punished(if we did start punishing this then no Republican could run for office) but normal people get fired and blacklisted. This seems like the Trump supports have a reasonably consistent position.
Also, I think there is a substantive difference between losing a fair election and as such not getting the job you wanted, and being fired/blacklisted, especially given the results of this election came after the majority of the behavior we are talking about.
I agree totally that extra special punishment is well out of line and generally think Trumps behavior in this was wrong and it was one of the many things I didn’t like about Trump. I am not convinced that the average Trump supporter had the same insight into the legalities that you do. I know at least as many Trump voters as I know Clinton voters, and my impression is that they are both largely expressing earnestly held beliefs. Of course I do go in for that mistake theory pretty hard, which is going to color my perspective.
Your precedent contains examples of people setting up systems to mishandle classified information? I understand you might portray this as simply mishandling classified information, to which I would agree with you. Sometimes people take something home, or send emails incorrectly. What people don’t merely get “fired” for is setting up systems that ensure lots of classified information is mailed through the postal service to their home. Essentially what she set up was an open port into classified systems, more or less what a hacker would do.
It is my understanding that it is every bit as illegal to send classified information over governmental email as it is over private email. You need to use a separate, secure channel for that. [This is going off secondhand information; I have never been employed by the government in any capacity and have no security clearances.]
Correct, at least as far as unclassified government email is concerned.
Interestingly, “mailing through the postal service” is legal, and could be used to set up a legal home office for handling classified information at up to Secret level. There’s lots of fairly specific and cumbersome procedures that would have to be followed if someone wanted to do that, though, and it wouldn’t have been particularly useful for Hillary.
I take your modus ponens and raise you a modus tollens. Everyone who violates the law should be punished according to the law. There should be no selective enforcement, because we (should) have a government of law not of men. If this means every politician gets locked up (RINO or not), then let it be so. Let Trump and Clinton be marched off to jail together.
And then, maybe just maybe we’ll get a government that actually repeals the overextensive laws on the book – even if they’re repealed by a brand-new legislature of people who’ve never before been in sight of politics because everyone better-qualified is now in prison.
Wait, when you said “everyone”, did you mean just politicians?
Because otherwise it’s going to be Trump and Clinton and you and me and Scott and everyone else here and everyone else in the country including all the jailers who could hypothetically let us out of jail when we realize what a stupid idea that was.
It’s not going to go quite that far in practice, because we’ll realize it was a stupid idea before we’ve locked up even 10% of the country. But, somebody has to go first and I think it ought to be you.
Good question! If it’s actually literally everyone, I’d actually be okay with that. If it’s “get those guys first, and then let’s stop the train before it hits the Ingroup,” I’m not; that’s just more selective enforcement.
My one exception to this is politicians. Since they’ve put themselves in a position where they could help stop overextensive laws, but have not in fact tried to do so, I consider them to have volunteered themselves to get the short straw so we can all get a better world in the end.
I see you are familiar with the concept of political hyperbole, as you well know no one wanted Clinton’s blood: they wanted her properly prosecuted by the DoJ for the crimes the FBI found her clearly committing.
Piggybacking on this to say: political scandals are just partisan bludgeons. None of them matter in the slightest.
I remember what a big deal the Valerie Plame affair was in the ’00s, leaking the identity of a covert CIA agent for political gain, accusations of official misconduct that might go all the way to the top… and then the leaker turned out to be not a partisan bomb-thrower like Cheney or Rove or Libby, but the moderate Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who clearly didn’t realize the significance of what he was doing. Everyone shuffled off in embarrassment and Armitage was never even charged with anything.
Incidentally, at the very same time, Colin Powell was using a private email server to conduct official business as Secretary of State, and there wasn’t a peep from anyone about it.
So while I don’t doubt that everyone here genuinely cares about the precise misconduct that major political figures are accused of, the masses don’t and the Washington power elite don’t. It’s all just partisanship.
No one is out there chanting for OJ Simpson to be locked up. Of course none of this was ever about justice or the rule of law.
As I recall, Colin Powell sometimes used a private email account when travelling because of the primitive nature of the department’s email system (it was early 2000s) and that doing so was not against the rules at the time. Clinton violated explicit rules, on a far wider scale, and destroyed the evidence after she got caught.
I don’t deny your basic point, but sometimes there is actual substance to scandal.
Everyone had learned things from Powell’s experience, and Powell warned Clinton that it could lead to a lot of trouble for her.
For those living in countries where coronavirus is not yet, here are things you can do, as an individual. But you should do it quickly!
* Ask everyone whether they have Skype and know how to use it. Help them install it, create for them an account. It will help older people during the days of isolation when the virus comes.
* Learn how to make face masks. Buy a lot of material. When the virus comes, the masks will be sold out quickly. People around you will be really grateful if you give them a few ones later. (Note: You will have enough time to make the masks when the virus comes; don’t waste time now. Just buy enough material.)
…uhm, other ideas? People living in areas already with coronavirus, what do you regret not having done sooner? (I mean other then the usual stuff like buying more food etc.)
I regret not buying enough liquid hand sanitizer for both the front door and the two cars my house has/uses. We’re stuck with alcohol wipes in the cars, which aren’t nearly as good.
I also regret not more aggressively using the first few hours when I noticed it was definitely going to be exponential in the U.S. to call friends and family and tell them to start distancing.
If it turns out to be true that people who get the virus and get really sick, but then recover, mostly recover to a new, lower baseline with significant organ damage and lowered lung capacity, then I’m *really* going to regret that I emphasized “distancing” rather than “total avoidance” with myself and friends and family.
What’s your source for the organ damage part? This is not how this sort of thing works, generally.
Also and separably, you almost certainly don’t know any of the people who’ve been spreading the virus around, so your not having been preternaturally quick to call people with advice they probably wouldn’t have taken isn’t in any real way blameworthy.
80% alcohol is as good as commercial sanitizer.
If pure alcohol is taxed highly in your country, you can dilute denatured alcohol (ethylated spirit) 4:1 v/v with water.
But beware: Every surface and disinfected hand will have a bitter taste afterwards that is hard to wash off — don’t use before preparing foods, or if you like thumbsucking. 🙂
They weren’t going to listen anyways. Believe me, I tried.
I’ve seen some stories about Jordan Peterson’s coma that seemed unreliable, probly because he’s so controversial. This one seems a little better, and has more info that I haven’t seen elsewhere, but of course is not completely un-biased.
What Happened to Jordan Peterson?
Lot’s of things that could be taken away from this article, a few –
addiction is not the same as dependence.
treating addiction/dependence is complicated.
you don’t want your addiction/dependence treated by a quack in Russia.
Jordan Peterson is a hypocrite who can’t follow his own advice.
Jordan Peterson (and his daughter) are grifters making money off of bogus stuff.
Jordan Peterson is a victim of media hostile to his ideas.
Our commentariat should have things to say – let’s hear it.
So… a guy is sick, takes medicine, finds out he has withdrawal syndroms. Oh, he’s an outgroup, let’s mock him publicly!
I did a brief literature review of medically-induced comas for treatment of addiction and withdrawal when I heard about this. What I came with was that the technique is no more effective in the short term, and less effective in the long term, than the conventional taper withdrawal method; addicts are more likely to relapse eventually with the experimental technique, and the induced coma technique itself is obviously very dangerous. I hope Peterson’s experience doesn’t convince others to try this technique.
Hit piece.
The carnivore diet isn’t a snake oil diet.
Yes, Mikhaila Peterson is making a business out of promoting it.
That doesn’t make her a grifter nor does it make the diet bogus stuff.
Jordan Peterson wasn’t promoting the carnivore diet either, he merely stated that it helped his daughter with her severe, lifeflong autoimmune issues and that it seems to work very well for him too with his own health issues on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Well and then he speculated a bunch on the topic for half an hour (with frequent disclaimers that he’s very much not an expert and can’t speak with any authority). Cause it’s that kind of podcast.
What Jordan Peterson does promote is his virtue ethics. He’ll fill a a stadium, pick a story from the bible and then spin some life lesson out of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLF29w6YqXs
“Dependency goes against the core tenets of Peterson’s philosophical brand: stoicism, self-reliance, the power of the will over circumstance and environment.”
I mean you can describe his “philosophical brand” like that, I guess.
(though it sounds kinda off, e.g. he never actually refers to the Stoics)
But saying that “being physically dependent on a drug” is against the core tenet of his philosophy is just sophistry.
What kind of philosophy is advocating for drug dependence?
No opinion on the treatment thing. Looks very dramatic, though.
Rastafarianism does, although they probably wouldn’t use those exact words. I think the Hippie philosophy from the 1960s did as well.
Rastas and hippies do not advocate drug dependence. They advocate the use of some drugs – only ganja for Rastas, cannabis and psychedelics for hippies.
It’s pretty damming. He maneuvered himself into a pretty deep hole. Should we have compassion? Sure. But we also need to be willing to say that no one in their right mind should take advice from him. Luke Ford does a far better job with the self-help shtick and he does it without pairing it with neoliberal economics.
Pop culture analysis I’d be happy to see:
@Plumber on the unrealistically spacious and non-toxic sewers in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and any number of video games).
@Le Maistre Chat,
That made me laugh!
But tell me about it! Those turtles never wear an air monitor or safety harness!
My suspension of disbelief for those wisecracking, pizza eating, bipedal amphibians is ruined!
Sewers that you can walk upright in is a pretty normal part of pop culture, not just in regards to TMNT. How common are sewers like that?
@Jay T,
Completely upright?
Not that common, I gather that there’s a bunch under London and Paris, and other pre-20th century built ones that were made of brick from the inside, but in the 20 months that my duties included opening sewer manholes and look in only twice did it look like someone had room to walk (at a crouch) the tunnels under the street, but I don’t think anyone’s going to get to a bank vault via one!
“Made of brick from the inside” is definitely the standard model visual artists use for video games, etc.
Overlord (on the one hand, medieval fantasy so “brick-built spacious” gets a pass, OTOH those ceilings look 4+ meters high!)
TMNT the arcade game
How come the Turtles never have to deal with Fatbergs?!?
The sewer museum in Paris is well worth a visit if you’re ever in the area.
There are plenty of sewer mains in San Francisco which are tall enough to stand in. I have some plans from a project at work which show “Standard Three-Compartment 8’3 x 9’6″ Sewer”, from plans dated 1909.
What really takes me out of it is when they describe themselves as amphibians. They should know that they’re reptiles!
TvTropes has a great entry for this phenomenon:
Absurdly Spacious Sewer
“These underground passages have more in common with the catacombs of Paris than any actual sewer system.”
Even for D&D purposes, I don’t know if I have the audacity to have storm water and poop flowing past densely-packed tombs. Maybe some day.
Not sewers, but I am always amused by the “this TV show has the WORLD’S LARGEST VENTILATION SHAFT” game.
@AG:
If it’s meant to be a space between floors then sure, but sometimes ventilation shafts really _can_ get that big!
In university I took a tour around the HVAC system of a large medical science building on campus. The tour ended with a look into the central ventilation shaft on ground level. It was bigger and wider than my (two-storey) house, and more than 100 feet long.
Sort of related: during a few brief stints living and working in NYC in my late teens and early 20s, several people told me there was a whole shadow-city in abandoned subway tunnels and other adjoined subterranean spaces, populated by an underground secret society of…I dunno. Probably not mutants.
That was years ago and I never bothered to follow up with internet research. Was this bogus or is it legit?
The Riverside Park Tunnel, an abandoned train tunnel in Manhattan, was famously used as a homeless encampment. It’s been restored to use so no longer is, but the homeless will naturally set up camp anywhere there’s shelter and no one to throw them out, so there are likely plenty of other similar places. But as for actual functioning cities underground… still rumor, as far as I know.
The authors of Relic and Reliquary mentioned their sources gave about 5000 living mostly-permanently underground in NYC. Books were from late 90es, so today –?
> Was this bogus or is it legit?
There are definitely people living in underground spaces in NYC. Here’s a good article about the “Mole People”: https://narratively.com/the-truth-about-new-yorks-legendary-mole-people/
The documentary “Dark Days” is about them: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235327/.
Among other places, it’s available as a DVD from Netflix: https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Dark-Days/60001871.
How might we most feasibly, and/or most cost-efficiently, modify the design of public spaces to make it harder for contagious diseases to propagate?
Example: it seems like it would be super good to adopt more automatic door openers, especially for restroom doors. In every US city I’ve lived in these have been uncommon for all but the largest and/or most directly health care oriented businesses. And note that this is an accessibility issue as well as a sanitary one. Maybe automatic door openers are too expensive or awkward for wider use? If so, why don’t we at least have more of those things you put on the bottoms of doors so people can open them with their feet?
Or is reducing the number of times people have to touch public door handles not as effective as one might think? If so, are there more effective design changes worth considering?
I’ve been wondering. It seems that for many diseases, being exposed to more of the disease causing agent leads to worse sickness. This is why more health care workers die of corona and Ebola than other people from their demographics.
So maybe being exposed to very small amounts of germs, like you might get from touching a public door handle and rubbing your face half an hour later, might not acting lead to “asymptomatic infections” that leave you immune.
Now, there are some diseases that can make you very ill from a small amount of virus / bacteria, but things like flu and corona seem to work on a more germs -> worse illness model. So constantly risking exposure to small amounts might be overall good for public health.
If this speculation is correct, then it might make sense to design public spaces to discourage direct close contact between people (e.g. by having little shields around the head rests of train seats), but at the same time encourage indirect contact over shared surfaces.
Virologists feel free to contradict me, but I don’t think you’re right about this. Source for elevated mortality among health care professionals, please? If that’s indeed true, I strongly expect it will be a statistical artifact rather than anything causal, but I don’t want to spout off too much without data to look at.
As to the mechanistic argument – well, as I say I’m not a virologist, but it seems to me that if things really worked this way it would be a whole lot easier to produce vaccines than it is.
They’re about $3,000 each just to purchase, plus the installation labor, then ongoing maintenance (door hardware in public buildings take a lot of abuse). This is one of those things where you only add a small amount to each project, but add up every bathroom door of every floor of every building, and you’re talking real money.
Thanks, very useful datum. Why is it so expensive? Would it be feasible to make a version that costs hundreds rather than thousands and works 90+% as well, but wouldn’t meet current regulatory mandates?
Also, https://www.stepnpull.com/shop has the low tech foot-operated solution for $30, and presumably it’s lower maintenance too, so cost doesn’t seem to explain the rarity of these (I only even know about them because some, though not all, of the bathrooms at my workplace have them).
I think you’d find that saving anything on initial cost ends up costing you more in maintenance. It costs that much because it has to put up with a lot of use and abuse.
Public bathrooms with a trash can next to the door make it easy to wash your hands, grab a paper towel to dry them, grab the door handle with the paper towel to open the door, then toss the towel in the garbage on the way out. My work bathroom is like this and I never touch the handle when I’m leaving.
I was at the airport the other day, and all they had were those Dyson Airblade blowers. I decided to walk out with wet hands.
You want door levers, not doorknobs. https://www.homedepot.com/b/Hardware-Door-Hardware-Door-Levers/N-5yc1vZc28z Much easier to use, can even be operated by elbow.
Oddly, I don’t see them in brass.
For larger bathrooms, or ones at the end of the hallway, wouldn’t it be easier to eliminate the door entirely and instead construct a wall or two such that one can walk into the bathroom without anyone outside being able to look in? I’ve seen this before at airports and some places overseas but it doesn’t seem to be a thing in most of the US. Then again, you’d still have to touch the doors to the stalls, which are probably equally dirty.
Yeah, this should be the standard for bathrooms that are large enough but in anything short of a thousands-of-people-size venue they generally aren’t.
And yes, you still need to touch the stalls at least when you go to latch the door. I don’t have a great answer to that one (maybe a pushbutton latch-engaging mechanism that could be pushed with an elbow rather than requiring a twist with the hand?) but at least that’s only one touch per bathroom trip instead of two.
It’s always seemed to me that it would help if you could make it so that bathroom doors open outwards, so that you have to touch the door handle on the way into the bathroom and then just push the door with your elbow on the way out. Another good one would be the increasingly popular bathroom setup where the stalls are all unisex with real doors and walls instead of the current dividers, and then the sink is just out in the open. That way you don’t have to touch any doors after washing your hands.
@Jay
Yes I was going to say the same thing about opening outwards. I noticed the bathroom at work is a push to get in, but there is no way to open the door on the way out except by pulling it with the hand. So I am catching the bugs of the folks who didn’t wash their hands properly, even if I wash mine perfectly.
I looked and there are some reasons, but nothing insurmountable: https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-do-most-bathroom-doors-open-inwards.html
+1 to putting the sinks outside of the stalls/private areas. In fact, much more ubiquitous handwashing sinks in public areas are probably a good idea generally.
This. When I walk into a restaurant, there should be a place right there to wash my hands. As it is, I need to awkwardly dodge back into the restroom before my food comes.
Airports tend to do the no doors thing, what is the minimum extra square footage needed to pull that off? Some places like restaurants probably don’t want it either way. I have also seen foot handles, which seem like a decent solution until you take off your shoes, still might be an improvement though.
The airport style is probably too big for anything short of a big-box store or mall. Certainly in e.g. dense city centers (which are particularly hard places to slow disease spread anyway) a typical store or restaurant is going to have a single-digit number of toilets/urinals in all its bathrooms.
People should be washing their hands after taking off their shoes anyway, so foot handles definitely seem like an improvement.
Why not just have a door that you can open with your foot? Step on a some kind of switch and you don’t need to grab a door handle without buying some crazy expensive tech.
Replace all stainless steel touch surfaces with brass.
…
Or maybe all touch surfaces with brass?
How feasible would a brass-plated keyboard and mouse be?
About a year ago, my work installed foot door openers on all restroom doors. Basically, it’s a spiky-ish bit of metal sticking out from under the door (spiky like a bike pedal, so there’s traction but doesn’t cause injury or damage to shoes). You just put your foot on it and pull, and you can open the door that way. It works great, and there’s no electronics or other costly components. Just looking at the materials, it looks like the sort of thing you could pick up from Home Depot for chump change.
I visited a workplace with those foot-door-openers and they were very awkward at first but I got better at them in a few days.
What happens when you have your foot on them and someone yanks open the door from the other side?
Well, if the opener is on the pull side the person on the other side will typically be pushing towards you, so maybe some loss of balance but less than if they were actually pulling your foot away from you.
Signs at work:
Inside the Public Defenders building along with busts of Malcolm X and posters of Che there’s a large handwritten note reading “If you were smart enough to finish law school you should be able to sort recycling from trash!”
Around the corner and across the street in the DA’s area there’s quotes from Ronald Reagan on the walls, and a cover of the book “Teach Your Cat About Gun Safety”, on the fourth floor there’s signs about a missing “service animal” – Waldo, a cat a police officer brought in that escaped.
Yes, “Where’s Waldo?”
A few nearby billboards sponsered by the Department of Public Health state: “Learn What to do in an overdose”, I see two on my drive in, and one on my drive out.
In the elevators and elsewhere there’s now “What to do about coronavirus” posters, these last ones prompted my boss to say “It’s crazy how people are hoarding toilet paper”, which prompted one of the guys from “The Russian Empire” (the boiler room) to say “In Soviet Union we just used newspaper”.
I had to bite my tongue hard to keep from blurting out: “I thought that in Soviet Russia paper use YOU!”
Finally found people with lower opinions of journalism than here.
Naa, it was just because the newspaper was softer.
The state has a strong incentive to ensure that citizens have access to propaganda. Toilet paper is less essential.
I read this at first as commentary on the historical figures in question, but I’m not sure what it means for a person to be recycling.
It means his ideas aren’t quite good enough to apply right away, but they’re good enough for other people to reuse, re-phrase, and build upon?
No, it means his ideas were good the first time but they’re used up now, but the good news is we can sanitize them and use them again for something else.
@Randy M,
Oh, maybe? That interpretation didn’t occur to me, I just find the obvious differences in political affiliations between the city departments/buildings funny as I do the other signs (well, except for “Worried about nova coronavirus?”).
The cops and D.A.’s have pro-Republican stuff (including bumper stickers on lockers that are for elections that were decades ago).
The custodians have pro-union stuff.
And the defenders are clearly further Left.
Beats looking at the plumbing!
Randy M’s interpretation was mine as well, and I liked that paragraph he quoted in particular as a great stand-alone joke. (Because I think the average American over the age of 25 will agree Malcolm X should be “recycled” while Che is “trash”.)
This vox piece featuring Gates from 2015 is pretty prescient.
Anyone coming down with flu-like symptoms and try to get tested for COVID-19? I’m in the USA, in a state that is around the median for reported cases as of today.
I have a ~100F fever and a slight cough that developed yesterday. I caught it from my wife who has been having the fever symptoms for the past 4 days or so. I’m a young guy in good health, so I’m not worried about dying from this thing. I just don’t want to be a liability.
My primary care clinic / and insurance provider are offering a useless online screening quiz. The quiz basically asks three questions:
1. Do you have flu-like symptoms?
2. Have you traveled to any of these countries (Italy, Iran, China, etc.)?
3. Have you come into contact with anyone who has a confirmed case of COVID-19?
They hide behind this quiz because they are the “latest CDC guidelines”. However, my workplace just instituted a ban for 14 days upon returning from a list of countries that is far more extensive than the one in the screening quiz — basically all of Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. It’s mind-boggling to me that it is common knowledge that we’re well into the community transmission stage but we are still giving a shit about travel. Plus, how can you possibly get a signal from #3 if you’re not testing people extensively?
Anyway, I took the quiz, answered no to #2 and #3, and was told that I shouldn’t get tested.
I persisted. I called my primary care clinic. The lady who picked up the phone, ran through the same questionnaire with me and told me I shouldn’t get tested. I did my best Saul Goodman impression and said, “I understand your guidelines. But let’s step back here and let’s talk, human being to human being. Is it really that big of an issue if one extra person gets tested? I’m not really worried about myself here; I can’t really work from home, but I would hate if I were unwittingly spreading this virus to my coworkers, who will spread it to their loved ones, and… I don’t want to feel responsible for whatever happens.”
That seemed to work, so she offered to transfer me over to the clinic that was actually expanding their testing capacity (in the big city). I talked to the receptionist there and ran through the same things. I did the same song and dance; she offered to transfer me to a triage nurse who would make the call on whether I could come in to get tested.
Unfortunately, the nurse who picked up the phone was from a different clinic in the big city than the one that was doing the testing — the two big city clinics have a shared phone line for nurses — and she didn’t want to violate the aforementioned guidelines, so she couldn’t make the call. She confessed that she still needed to be briefed on the situation for expanded testing, so she didn’t know what was going on over at the other clinic. I made her promise me that someone from the other clinic would call me back who could make the decision whether to have me tested or not.
I’m still waiting for that call, about 2 hours later. We’ll see.
Serious question: What difference does it make? You’ve probably got an infectious disease that you shouldn’t be exposing other people to, so you should probably isolate yourself for a while. You’re in a permissive environment for self-isolation; it’s unlikely your boss is going to fire you if you say “Hey, I’ve got a cough and a fever so I really think I should stay home from work this week”. But you’re apparently not in life-threatening danger, and you’re almost certainly sensible enough to call an ambulance if that changes. You should be in an environment where a positive COVID-19 test means local health authorities go around investigating and testing all your recent contacts, but that’s not going to happen either.
So, what relevant actions would you take if a test came back positive, that you wouldn’t take if the test result was negative or ambiguous or there was no test? Is there something about your personal circumstances that makes this unusually relevant?
John/Aapje
You’re absolutely right. The only relevant detail here is workplace policy. Anyone who tests positive has a no-questions-asked 14 days in quarantine, then has to have a doctor’s note permitting them to return to work.
The pressure to go into work even if I’m sick is high because I work on a very high visibility project that needs my body in the factory every day to help move things along. So there’s a lot of pressure for me to show up and get results.
But, as you say, there’s a 0% chance I get fired for staying home, so that’s what I’ll do.
If your boss does demand that you come in, demand a written statement that he’s aware that you were refused a test and that you believe that you have COVID, but nevertheless wants you to work. That should clinch it, because it’s a basically a ‘fire me’ notice if you would go to work and infect everyone.
It’s probably a lot worse for your image if you end up infecting everyone.
@J.R
I agree with John. Just call in sick and tell your boss that you might have COVID. He’s going to want to cover his ass, just like the nurse.
You say you caught this from your wife. Do you or she have reason to believe that she has been exposed to, or in contact with, someone who has a feasible chance of having COVID-19? I understand you want to be tested, but this is precisely the reaction that is over-stretching the health service. Agreed that the lag between the old and new recommendations is bad but on the other hand, if everyone who has “flu-like” symptoms turns up to be tested, that’s a huge clog on the system and uses up testing kits which seem – at present – not to be supplied in the numbers they should be.
You tried to spin it to the receptionist as “I’m just one guy, how bad could it be if I got tested even if I don’t fit the criteria?” but you’re not “just one guy”, or rather, there are hundreds if not thousands of other people thinking the same thing.
Even if you have the virus (unlikely, but we can’t rule it out) – are you in an area with confirmed cases? are you elderly or suffering from conditions that will make it more hazardous e.g. immuno-suppressed, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart or lung problems? are you otherwise young and healthy? If so, then self-isolating is probably the best way to go.
Not to sound like I’m hammering you, but there’s a lot of panic and a lot of assumptions that things can go on as normal re: getting doctor’s appointments and testing. Worst case scenario – if you’re young and in good health without the aggravating conditions – you’re one of the majority who get it, get over it, and have no long-lasting effects. Stay home if you can, your wife stays home also, and both of you practice social distancing and take care. Like John Schilling says – ring your boss/workplace, tell them your wife is sick and you’ve picked it up too, and just in case it is the virus you’re both staying home.
In an ideal world you’d get tested. This is not that world.
Right now tests are scarce and there are probably people who need them more than you. And you bugging all these nurses is just burdening the health system.
My county of over a million people has 3 tests. (Once they use them up, they can ask for more.)
We have 2 confirmed cases. Like 3.6 Roentgen.
My best recommendation to anyone in this situation: start by getting a flu test. They’re fast, cheap, actionable, not in short supply, and a positive result pretty much implies being negative for COVID (unless you’re really unlucky). Make sure your provider knows you’re coming in with symptoms, they’ll take the proper precautions.
Also: this CDC page tracks the number of tests performed each day in the USA. Unfortunately, this makes it clear why it’s so hard to be tested if the path from you to COVID isn’t embarrassingly obvious.
#3 reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg bit, “I get the roundabout AIDS test. I call up my friend Brian and say “Brian, do you know anyone that has AIDS?” “No” “Cool, cause you know me.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-president-coronavirus-test-positive-2020-3
Jair Bolsonaro seems to have been infected with Coronavirus, apparently after a meeting with Trump. Given how carefree both Trump and the Democratic candidates seem to be with their own safety in the face of Coronavirus, I expect the amount of significant politicians infected to increase significantly.
Your article says the exact opposite of what you’re claiming. I think they’ve updated it since you read it, since they are now saying that Bolsonaro denies having tested positive and remains uninfected.
This. Also:
… why are we not testing asymptomatic famous people who are shoulder-to-shoulder with ten thousand people a day and have been within a hundred feet of a confirmed case?
Why would we do that? People might test positive, and that would be terrible.
…Not before I told my office he tested positive. I feel really stupid for not clicking the link to read it first.
Let this be a lesson to you: always click on links.
I’m learning so much today.
This.
Also: never click on links.
Indeed, just stay between extremes…in the purgatory, where your soul gets burned clean.
I only know the vaguest details about Bolsonaro, but is it far fetched he’s just lying and he actually tested positive?
Bolsonaro is a habitual liar, so no.
Do you have any vaguely unbiased evidence that he is more of a habitual liar than, say, Bernie Sanders?
I read earlier that Justin Trudeau’s wife has tested positive as well.
Correct. He is in isolation but has not been tested yet as he is not showing any symptoms.
I presume that’s because they want to be silent and let the potential virus go into the distance rather than startle it with a testing kit.
23/290 members of Iran’s parliament tested positive.
What is the chance that Ayatollah Khamenei (age 80) catches it? Does he interact much with parliament?
So what happens if the remaining Democratic candidates get wiped out? I guess Buttigieg technically only suspended his campaign, and he might still have more delegates than Tulsi, hah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miri_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)
@Edward Scizorhands,
Yes compared to Bernie and Joe they are, but which one will be become a group and get cast out first?
@AG,
The delegates already selected are obligated to vote for who their pledged to (I don’t know if there’s a “but my guy is deceased” clause), I presume that being dead counts as “won’t accept the nomination”, and the delegates will be free to vote in a second round along with the additional “superdelegates” (about 15% of total delegates).
I think that if a candidate dies, it’d be treated under the same rules as if a candidate drops out: their district-level delegates become unpledged and can vote for whomever on the first ballot, and their state-level delegate slots are reapportioned among the still-active candidates who got above the 15% threshold in the state’s primary.
Thoughts on whether any of the current dividend aristocrats are at high risk of cutting their dividend?
I’m looking at XOM, whose yield was up to 9.83% earlier today. XOM and CVX could continue to get pummeled even if the US goes into lockdown and safely comes out at the beginning of May, due to the Russia-OPEC gambit and how exposed oil stocks are to Russia and a handful of countries next to Iran, any of which could bungle pandemic response.
I work in that industry and I would not be buying any of those stocks any time soon, myself.
I think I’m technically not allowed to say much more than that.
I meant “I’m looking at” as most risky in the group, not “I’m looking to buy!”
(I’ve had 27 shares of CVX for almost a year. That’s enough oil exposure for me. 🙁 )
How long do you plan to hold onto those stocks? I wouldn’t expect the oil industry to bounce back any time soon.
I dunno, maybe 25 years? I’ve picked a few dividend aristocrats since liquidizing a house, and the idea was value investing that also produces an income stream to pay bills no matter how bad other life circumstances get (like unemployed + widowed or divorced).
Just be prepared to lose 50% of your investment. I don’t know if it will get that bad, but it might.
I didn’t think I’d be much affected by the C. Virus. Of course the French government have now closed all the schools so my kids are going to be at home for 5 weeks. I also had a three week working holiday in Spain planned for a weeks time. That looks increasingly unlikely to happen, although I could make a dash for it now, leave my wife to deal with the kids and get to Spain just before the border is closed…
Interesting times, and it is probably worth adding that my initial interpretation of what would happen with the virus was very wrong. I still think that the biggest disruption will be caused by governmental reaction to the outbreak, but wrong that this would somehow be unjustified or unnecessary. Live and learn, I suppose, but a fairly large portion of humble pie nonetheless.
Scott, I’d like to reiterate my suggestion to quarantine coronavirus discussion to a particular open thread every two weeks. The one time open thread about it clearly did not do the trick, and at this point nearly half the top level comments, and probably most of the comments overall, are about it.
The advantage of having it in the regularly scheduled open thread is that you can be reasonably certain what you are reading is mostly up to date. If you’re only making one thread every two weeks you have to sift through a lot of outdated crap, plus given the volume of discussion those bi-weekly threads would be HUGE and unwieldy. There would need to be an OCT (Open Corona Thread) basically on the same schedule as the regular OT for it to work and be useful.
Personally I’m fine having it as part of the regular OT, and probably slightly prefer it that way.
One problem is that the threading structure makes a single “coronavirus thread” implausible in an open thread, for example during this open thread Trump banned all travel from the EU, which spawned a comment thread.
But there is too much going on (it’s probably the single biggest world story by a large margin) to put it off for two week centers.
I’m suggesting quarantining it to .75 or something, not to a single comment.
Nick – serious question: When it comes to establishing a quarantine, why are you expecting Scott’s response to this crisis to be any more effective than the CDC’s?
(I lied. That was not a serious question)
Nonserious answer to a nonserious question: Scott has repeatedly suggested abolishing the FDA, which alone would have saved us weeks!
More seriously, the responses have got me thinking that maybe a coronavirus-free thread would be better.
@Nick
I think that’s a much better idea. A virus-free zone would be a pleasant place in these Corona-infested times.
While realizing this is not a democracy, I’d argue against quarantining this discussion. It’s objectively the biggest topic in the world right now, and the different top-level comments (at least to me) are discussing different aspects of the outbreak.
That is my opinion as well, and it shouldn’t (hopefully) last ore than a few weeks.
I fear you are being wildly optimistic.
The epidemic may well last longer, but after a while it just becomes the new normal.
The reason the topic is on everyone’s lips (and keyboards) right now is that the past week is when most of the significant political response started taking place. The vast majority of us aren’t likely to see any major health-related issues due to COVID-19*, but we are seeing plenty of disruption in our lives because of the counter-measures being taken.
In a few weeks, we’ll either have adjusted to the disruptions (humans are capable of adjusting to nearly anything) or we’ll simply have nothing new to say about them. There’s also a possibility that they’ll start being rolled back because they’re either considered to have served their purpose or are found to be unnecessary.
Either way, I’ve seen a bunch of crises in my life to date (including more disruptive than this) and know that after a while they just become part of the background noise. This is probably a Good Thing.
—
* This is a guess based on the currently published number of identified cases and deaths. Personally, I expect the number of actual infections to be at least an order-of-magnitude higher than the number of confirmed cases (because of testing protocols) and therefore the public health impact to be comparable to a bad ‘flu season at worst.
Well it is a pretty big deal
I agree. But I think making a dedicated post, maybe even one every week, would help people discuss it. (That post would still be full of individual threads.)
And people who are trying to disconnect from it for mental health reasons should be allowed to. I don’t bring it up to my wife (unless she brings it up herself, which happens often enough) because it’s stressing her out.
If we quarantine coronavirus threads, I’d like to just see a duplicate of each thread. (I.e. .25 Open, .25 covid and so on). I appreciate people wanting COV out of the general thread, but it’s fast moving and important, so I appreciate having a fresh thread to discuss it in.
Hey, we don’t have enough resources to test every comment thread for potential coronavirus.
Instead, people should just panic uncontrollably.
I just want to say I laughed at this. Good job!
Without demolishing any buildings or major roads that were part of its original design, how would you fix Brasilia’s urban planning defects?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/brasilia-how-not-to-build-a-city/
Heavy investment in public transportation (add more metro stations and bus service), heavy investment in bike and moped lanes. Fix the zoning laws.
The low-hanging fruit is probably to change zoning rules to allow buildings in residential zones to be partially repurposed for commercial use. Converting the bottom floor or two of a big apartment building into shops and offices means that residents just have to take the elevator downstairs to do basic shopping rather than needing to get in a car or on a bus or train to go to a different part of the city. Offices help less in the short-term, but a few years down the road it means a nontrivial percentage of the population will be able to plan their living arrangements so they can commute by elevator or by walking a short distance to a nearby tower.
My time to shine. I actually live and was born and raised in Brasilia.
Now, I’m obviously very biased, but I completely disagree with the article. I actually think Brasilia is a big success (my comparison points, I have lived in São Paulo and in Melbourne – Australia) and most of the people that I know tend to like living here a lot (and I know lots of people that came to work here from elsewhere in Brazil). This applies to a subset of people living here – upper middle class that actually lives in the heritage protected part of the city, most people live in peripheral cities and suburbs that have more “normal” urban characteristics.
People say as if there is no commerce close to where people live, but every residential block has an adjacent (<5 min walking) that has most necessary shops (small grocery stores, farmacy, restaurants, coffee shops, etc).
Brasilia also has the best traffic of all major Brazillian cities, and although public transport could be better, it is not awful by any stretch. And, anyway, most traffic is present in commuting roads, not within the city itself, where it tends to flow very well. People that live in Brasilia rarely need to drive for more than 15 min to get to work.
It's hard putting it to words really, but I really do enjoy living here, and not only because of the fact that I was born here or whatever. I feel like the city has just the right amount of density, not to dense to become too chaotic to actually live in, while not too sparse to make everything too far away. The actual problem of Brasilia is not brasilia itself, which works just fine, but the adjacent city/suburbs.
It’s hard to argue with someone who actually lives there.
Thanks, this is a very useful comment that pushes against my (mostly uninformed) intuition. You say: “The actual problem of Brasilia is not brasilia itself, which works just fine, but the adjacent city/suburbs.” Why is that the case?
It’s good to see that, as the world’s about to end, we’re focused on the important things.
The left is policing language because that’s all they know how to do anymore. An announcement by a Republican Congressman that he tested positive was immediately denounced by a blue-check mob as racist for calling it the “Wuhan virus.” To be clear, lots of diseases are named after the places where they were discovered – Ebola, Lyme disease, MERS, Norwalk virus – but the official WHO designation for this one is COVID-19. (Of course, WHO has been spending most of the crisis trying to deflect blame away from the Chinese government, and the name “COVID-19” may very well be part of that.) In any event, calling it “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus” is now a surefire way to trigger the libs, so everyone to the right of Mitt Romney is doing just that. And now apparently high-ranking figures in the Chinese government are calling the virus a bioweapon of US Army origin…
It’s been a good run, humanity.
I know it’s a letter off, but whenever I see “COVID” I think of crows.
Speaking of avians, it does seem like a rather a lot of recent novel viruses originate in China. Maybe that’s just a numbers game, given the population?
Most likely, COVID-19 is from bats, which are apparently traded in food markets in the-province-that-must-not-be-named in the-country-that-must-not-be-named in the same sentence as the disease. Bats carry a bunch of corona viruses, apparently.
In the west, we eat relatively few species, and the food industry is, well, industrialized, meaning relatively few people are in direct contact with the animals. Other countries differ in both regards, and when multiplied with the population density, it is perhaps not surprising that this is where many epidemics are born.
(I expect one day we will pay them back with some nasty antibiotic resistant bacterial strain.)
We’ve probably already done that.
There’s also the fact that the food market in question isn’t exactly sanitary.
“Stop calling it Wuhan virus. It’s racist.”
“Here’s you guys calling it Wuhan Virus for weeks.”
“This is what you’re worried about?”
https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1238252922598760450 for context.
It’s been a good run, humanity.
Nah, we’re stupid and I’ve always said that. But even with the inevitable deaths from this new virus, I don’t think we’re done yet. I honestly don’t expect real-world institutions to have the kind of smooth effortless efficiency that the movies portray their competent government heroes to have in the face of crises (the kind of super-star American President who leads by example and unites the nation by sheer charisma and hyper-capability that you see in disaster movies, for example). So the stupidity and “X does A, Y does B, C doesn’t know which of them to copy” isn’t anything strange, new or startling (that we’ve survived this long is the surprise, as far as I’m concerned).
The real threat will be running out of loo roll! (My sister up North tells me there’s not a roll to be got in her local Asda) 🙂
IDK, when I hear “Chinese coronovirus”, I assume the Chinese thing is thrown in there with deliberate malice these days. Is there a different coronavirus we’re supposed to be worried about right now and we’re just trying to be clear? Do people not know which virus we’re talking about so we have to make it clear that it’s the one that started in China a few months back?
A month ago (which is when it looks like most of those clips are from; Dr. Li died 7 Feb, the Diamond Princess was quarantined around 10 Feb; others don’t really have context), I think there were still plenty of folks that weren’t following the story. Nearly all of the known cases were in Wuhan back then, whereas now it’s obviously gone global. Once the NBA gets canceled, I don’t think there’s any confusion, whereas a month ago, I think there were plenty of cable news watchers that didn’t know what “the coronavirus” or “COVID” or “COVID-19” was. (Though mind you, plenty of experts did!)
I would recommend that instead of assuming malice, you at least consider the (very high, IMHO) possibility that the person you’re hearing is simply speaking naturally without a politically correct filter. This virus has been called the Wuhan virus or something similar for a couple of months, until some woke people on Twitter decided to get outraged on behalf of the Chinese. Most of the world still ignores woke-ism, and unless you equate ignoring woke-ism with deliberate malice, you’re bound to have many false positives of deliberate malice in the next few weeks.
Interesting. Maybe we exist in different spheres and have different outgroups, but my interpretation was that the “Don’t call it Chinese” push came from inside China/the Chinese government and was being pushed by reliable CCP mouthpieces abroad.
That may very well be true also. I mainly saw it on twitter from blue checkmarks.
It’s simultaneously true that Chinese people are particularly sensitive about being associated with illness, that the Chinese government is running its propaganda on full steam to deny any responsibility, and that American left-wingers are obsessed with finding and calling out bigotry on the most specious of grounds. In my experience the tankies and the wokies don’t get along, so I doubt it’s a single organized campaign.
It should be. If the Communist Chinese government hadn’t cracked down on doctors who were sounding the alarm in November, this wouldn’t be a global pandemic at all.
Their government bears every drop of blood from this pandemic.
Which, to my point above, is why they are so strident about denying responsibility for it.
@Aftagley
You posted at the same time as me. I agree with you as much as possible.
Do people not know which virus we’re talking about so we have to make it clear that it’s the one that started in China a few months back?
Better tell Wikipedia to get its act together, so: is there anyone alive today who does not, after this distance of time, know which First World War epidemic we’re talking about and so should know not to call it the Spanish Flu because after all it went global? How insensitive! It must be deliberate malice!
Or else it could be, as they say, “colloquially known as”.
Let’s be clear though, no one was calling it “Wuhan coronavirus” or “Chinese coronavirus” much until recently. (I checked the last two OTs and the coronavirus megathread, not one single usage out of hundreds, and some people defending the “Wuhan coronavirus” usage were perfectly happy to just call it “coronavirus” then.)
I think I have the right to be annoyed by that manipulative change in language and especially to be annoyed by attempts to gaslight me about how we were all talking about this a week ago.
Until a few days ago, the media was pretty commonly referring to it as the Chinese Coronavirus or Wuhan Coronavirus, see here.
Excuse the overly partisan nature of the particular tweet, but how do you account for this video?
@mitv150, @Matt M what is the denominator?
Not really sure the denominator matters . . . the question isn’t how common the usage was. The point is that the people calling it the Wuhan or Chinese coronavirus throughout January and February are the very same people now saying that the term is racist or xenophobic.
These terms were perfectly fine for two months and raised no eyebrows until it became fashionable to attack the GOP over their use.
I don’t know how reliable this methodology is, but google searching in the date range 2020-02-01 to 2020-03-01 gives 47,900 results for “Chinese coronavirus,” 189,000 for “Wuhan coronavirus” and 506,000,000 for just plain coronavirus. So the fraction is extremely small.
Are google results reliable for this sort of thing? I honestly have no idea.
@mitv150
I’m not saying it’s intrinsically racist, I’m saying that I’m annoyed that people (in this case, right-wingers) are shifting the language in a way that provokes fights while gaslighting us about it.
Yes the antiracists should have just let it go but “antiracists bad” is amply covered here.
Did you see Matt M’s video? CNN’s been calling it the “Wuhan coronavirus” or the “Chinese coronavirus” for months now. If they’ve now stopped, but the right wingers are still using the language, that’s not the right “shifting the language.”
Christ, I didn’t watch the video all the way through until just now, but some of those usages are obviously people saying “China’s coronavirus outbreak” or similar and not “Chinese coronavirus outbreak”. Of course those usages are toward the end of the video where I’m guessing most people won’t watch to. (And more I suspect were edited that way – e.g. someone says “China’s coronavirus problem” and the video cuts it before “problem” and it sounds a lot like “Chinese coronavirus” if you aren’t listening carefully.)
Also, for a while I was hearing that you shouldn’t be calling it “the coronavirus” because all the smart people know there’s lots of coronaviruses, and this is the “novel coronavirus recently identified in Wuhan, China.”
Remember, it’s important to keep the spider from touching your face.
I’m really sorry if pointing out that lots of weird viruses keep coming from China is hurting Chinese people’s feelings. But I don’t think that’s really the big problem right now. Also, maybe the shaming isn’t a bad thing? Maybe they should think about eating fewer bats?
You want to call it Wuhan coronavirus because of precision issues, and to support this you link something that talks about how Covid-19 is the correct name?
Anyway, if you want to defend actively changing the language in order to offend the Chinese, you can do that. At least it’s honest. I will say that it’s not a good idea; recall that we might need to cooperate closely with China over the next few months. Having some of their experts visit to advise on how to build a hospital in 3 days might come in awfully handy soon, and if we collectively antagonize them we might find their experts are all otherwise engaged.
According to BBA below it wasn’t called COVID-19 until a few weeks ago.
Usage of the terms “Chinese Coronavirus” and “Wuhan Coronavirus” both peaked in late January for Google searches, so it was out there, and more popular to look for than it currently is. I don’t think it was ever the dominant term though.
@Conrad Honcho
I’ll point out that you and every other commenter were content to call it “coronavirus” until a couple days ago. None of the arguments for it have changed. The only thing that has created interest in calling it “Chinese” is that you found out it would trigger some woke people.
Changing your behavior just to annoy the woke people and increase the general amount of divisiveness in society isn’t racist, but it is pretty childish.
searching through google with the site command I find
npr.org and nytimes.com were using “Wuhan Coronavirus” late January and early February.
@Chalid
Defying censors is inherently virtuous.
I never really felt the urge to use any anti-Christian slurs on SSC, but if it’s inherently virtuous to defy censors then I guess I need to modify that behavior in order to become a better person.
Except that, as I showed above, it’s something that peaked in January before the virus had a name, so in this case it seems like it’s mostly the woke people are trying to trigger the non-woke.
It peaked in January, but was never very high. Google Trends doesn’t do denominators either, surely you noticed?
Going by the google count methodology, which I’m sure is flawed, but hopefully is not orders of magnitude off:
after:2020-01-01 before:2020-02-01 “coronavirus” gives 335,000,000 results.
after:2020-01-01 before:2020-02-01 “wuhan coronavirus” gives 129000 results.
after:2020-01-01 before:2020-02-01 “chinese coronavirus” gives 27200 results.
So yes, usage of some Chinese adjective may have been more common in January, but I maintain that no one has presented any evidence that it was actually common.
I want to go reemphasize what I said: ” no one was calling it “Wuhan coronavirus” or “Chinese coronavirus” much.” That specifically includes you, SSC commenters.
No one is arguing that the phrase “Wuhan Coronavirus” was invented a week ago. If someone does make that silly argument, then all the links you guys are posting will become relevant. But in this discussion, *examples* tell us little about *rates*.
The SSC commentariat is not representative. “People didn’t say X because SSCers didn’t say X” is not a good argument.
There were those complaining about calling it the “Chinese” or “Wuhan” coronavirus even before it had a name (even “2019-nCoV”). Never mind the Spanish Flu, Lyme disease, Ebola Marburg, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, etc. Lots of diseases are named after a first discovered or otherwise significant patient, others after the discoverer, and many after the place they were discovered or investigated. That’s not racist and it was always dumb to say it was.
Personally I object to “Chinese coronavirus” because China is just too big to name a disease after; this is the _second_ novel human coronavirus out of China in recent years, after all, SARS being the first.
I never said it was used much, I explicitly said it wasn’t actually. I’m just saying that the limited use of it wasn’t an issue until a Republican used the term, and then it became an issue. So in this case, it sure looks a lot more like the woke crowd is the one being childish.
Also, the number of Google results is fairly meaningless since “coronavirus” will return millions of hits that have nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2. In fact, if you search for coronavirus right now, the number one result has nothing to do with the current outbreak.
It was only in mid-February that the virus was officially named “COVID-19.” Before then it was a mix of “coronavirus”, “novel coronavirus”, “Wuhan virus”, just “the virus”, etc. I don’t think the particular phrase “Wuhan coronavirus” was ever in wide use.
Mid-February was also when America started taking the threat seriously. Until then it was just seen as China’s problem, with a right-wing narrative of “don’t let it spook the markets” and a left-wing narrative of “the real threat is racism.” And though we are taking it seriously now, clearly we can’t let our narratives go so easily.
I don’t think “Wuhan virus” is racist, but I do think it’s obviously meant to trigger the libs. And okay, maybe we libs shouldn’t be so easily triggered, but it’s still pretty damn obnoxious to do it. (I also don’t care for “small hands” jokes. They weren’t even that funny the first time.)
The virus is named SARS-CoV-2, which is a terrible name because it’s too long; apparently some groups want it to be changed to HCoV-19 (Human Coronavirus 2019). The disease it causes is COVID-19.
There was a memo that went out saying that calling it the Wuhan virus was racist. Didn’t everyone get it?
Really, on this
1. China’s Chernobyl-like handling of this should not be forgotten. I doubt anyone is going to, but if they do it would happen with double-speak like this.
2. Calling it Chinese virus or wuhan virus or the foreign virus is probably just doing it to trigger people. So like don’t.
3. But. And this is important. Changing the names of things and calling people who use the old name racist is something that’s the domain of the privileged. Being able to track stuff like this is something that is very easy for people with lots of spoons.
The wiki page was “Wuhan coronavirus” until Feb 18:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic
unless the plane was recently used to go elsewhere
Of course it was? That’s what planes are for.
It’s expensive and unpleasant but I think the safest thing would be to rent a car and drive, and stay in hotels that can be trusted to have done good cleaning.
If she’s really immunocompromised and really, really needs zero exposure, she could wait 48 hours between renting the car and actually driving it (virus doesn’t live that long on surfaces) and sleep in the car to avoid hotel exposures.
Thanks for the reply; I deleted the original as it seemed a bit personal and slightly less relevant after recent discussion (I need to stop doing that). For context, my wife is considering whether to cancel a flight to avoid a return through LAX.
It seems a kindly friend has offered to drive to fetch her, as CA schools are shutting anyway.
Yeah, I realized as typing that the current passengers wouldn’t be the only concern.
I opened the JHU dashboard right now and then number of cases is down to 91,773. Some countries are missing from the list, among them Iran, Italy, South Korea, Spain, and Germany.
Did somebody press the exterminatus button? I think it was too soon.
Huh, back to normal now.
Re: Rhetoric. Islamic terrorism is a long, long-term (like, civilization long) problem. That is well studied (or at least extensively studied). COVID-19 is a novel, poorly studied, and while damaging, probably short-term problem. I don’t think you can really compare the two in terms of “damage.” I still think the panic will likely be worse than the disease, so I’m okay with Trump attempting to calm people’s fears.
I still think the criticism of Trump, while the crisis is still ongoing, is unnecessary politicization. If he calms people down to prevent panic, he get slammed for “downplaying the seriousness of the disease.” If he tells everybody to prepare for the worst, he gets slammed for “manufacturing a crisis” probably for the purposes of fascism or racism or something. Getting it exactly right isn’t possible, because no one knows what that is, and “listening to the experts” isn’t even viable because the experts say different things. I see takes like “sure, I guess banning travel to Europe is good, but he should have done it a week ago and now it’s too late!” But who was saying that a week ago? Was the person claiming it should have been a week ago saying that a week ago? Everybody do the best you can, when the crisis is over you can yell at Trump for how stupid and evil he is, regardless of the outcome.
Re: Bill Gates. Yes, I think he would do a great job of handling coronavirus containment.
Re: Economy. I won’t be shocked to see unemployment tick up 2%, and GDP growth to be stagnant or even negative. While technically this might count as a recession (two quarters negative growth, I think it is?) I expect everything to come roaring back afterwards, because the fundamentals of the economy are strong. There will be a lot of money to be made cleaning up after the mess. Earthquakes don’t cause recessions, either.
I don’t think a corona-triggered recession will matter for the elections. I think people will largely understand this is a novel situation. I do think the naked politicization of the virus could backfire. Everyone’s trying best they can to deal with a chaotic, scary, dangerous situation, and I find the people taking the opportunity to gleefully hurl partisan insults over it gross. Really, really gross. I can’t be the only one.
I actually want to complement Gavin Newsom of California, no stranger to criticizing Trump, who seems to be doing this. Good job, Gavin and California!
@EchoChaos >
While granting that you’re a “give credit where credit is due” gu” that’s not a sentence I would’ve bet you’d post (me either come to think about it)!
Disregarding their policies I’ve found both Newsom and Trump loathsome (’cause of reports of their personal lives and, well, really their hair!), but in how the’ve responded to the epidemic I really can’t imagine a President Clinton or a Governor Cox doing better.
Agreed on all counts
It’s also worth noting that Gavin Newsom is probably a replicant. Specifically, he failed a Voight-Kampff test in 2003.
And sadly, there’s precedent for this. This isn’t the first time Californians have elected an evil robot from the future to be our Governor.
@Eric Rail,
Well I’m convinced!
Also, I’m now in the tank for incorporating the Voight-Kampff test in candidate debates.
How is this not broken windows thinking? There will be some people who profit (rightfully) off of there work mitigating the losses incurred by the enforced sabbaticals and aiding the sick. But on the whole we are still losing out.
I get markets recovering from seeing that long term trends are back to being rosy, but I don’t think cleaning up messes helps us relative to not having them.
Earthquakes are localized and we haven’t had big ones in awhile.
Just saying it gets people to work, consuming. Bootstraps stuff back up.
I guess it’s a difference of perspective on the strength of the economy. Is it making stuff worth having or is it trading dollars around. Disasters certainly get plenty of the latter going on, but they diminish the former, for a time at least.
If he calms people down to prevent panic, he get slammed for “downplaying the seriousness of the disease.” If he tells everybody to prepare for the worst, x or something.
There is a huge gap between those two extremes.
he gets slammed for “manufacturing a crisis” probably for the purposes of fascism or racism or something.
Too bad. People will call you names for doing your job? Then do your job and let people call you names. Besides, this is Donald Trump, and he isn’t supposed to care about people calling him names.*
If he tells everybody to prepare
This isn’t a movie where the government is secretly trying to stop a loose nuke or a rogue asteroid, which either gets fixed without us knowing about it or wipes us out instantly without us knowing about it. (For all we know, the government regularly handles those.)
But the public is not just an audience here. They are a critical component of response. You need the people doing smart things, and avoiding doing dumb things, in order for us to respond. Are people washing their hands? Are they social distancing? What do you need them to do? Are they doing it? Aside from response, people should be prepared, and a little bit of prep can go a long way.
* This reminds me eerily of defenders of Bill Clinton who said “but if he pleaded the Fifth about having sex with Lewinsky, his opponents would have made political hay out of it!” Yes. And? Do your job.
Yes, and Trump’s detractors are confusing and frightening them callously for political gain. Great, fine, play political games, but I do not believe it is in the interests of public or economic health.
Edited for less snark.
Let’s assume one has a month’s word of non-perishable goods and other assorted necessities stock-piled. Should such goods be:
-used now so as to avoid going to public places;
-used once the local confirmed case count begins to rise; or
-stored against the possibility that food will become actually difficult to obtain.
Depends on how risk averse you are.
If you 100% absolutely need to avoid Wuhan Coronavirus, e.g. you are immunocompromised or elderly, you should hunker down now unless you live in rural Idaho/Alabama already. There is almost certainly some degree of hidden community spread occurring and a month from now we may be saved by a warm spring.
If you can afford to get it but would prefer not to, we’re still definitely at the place where you can just avoid crowds and keep your reserve in case something truly unexpected happens.
Please stop spreading this meme. It’s deeply irresponsible.
No, I won’t.
It is a fact that in a month we may be saved by a warm spring. It is something that should absolutely be considered when judging lockdown start and duration.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-flu-weather-temperature-intl-hnk/index.html
Does this mean that people who live in warmer-than-average climates are already at less risk and can take less severe measures?
Like, I’m in Texas. It’s 9 AM in the morning and already in the 70s outside. Should I be less freaked out than the people who live in Ohio because of this?
@Matt M
Probably. Texas currently isn’t seeing any serious domestic spread. All the places that we’re seeing serious spread in the United States are similar to Korea/China/N. Italy in climate.
To put it in perspective, Texas is the second largest state in the Union and has fewer cases than Colorado, Florida is similar. Denver is a major international hub and cooler and drier.
I’d still steer clear of major gatherings and airports.
Note that I am not a doctor and all that I said earlier was prefaced with “may”. Wuhan Coronavirus is novel, which means that it could behave differently.
A paper using data from different Chinese cities estimates that 1 degree F or 1% RH decrease R0 by about 0.02. So if it is 30 degrees warmer somewhere that is like 0.6 lower. This is enough to make a big difference in the rate of spread or the amount of social distancing needed to control the disease, but it probably isn’t enough that anywhere can afford to be complacent.
@actinide meta
Would you be kind enough to post a link or citation to the paper relating temperature and R0. Thanks!
I’d be very skeptical about relying on the climate to keep you safe. You used “may”, which is appropriate, because there isn’t definitive data about whether and how this coronavirus is effected by climate. Most are, but not all. We also don’t know how much temperatures will climb in the next few months. We know what it’ll do on average, but when you’ve got exponential growth, relying on averages is often dumb.
@actinide meta posted that the spread rate decreases by about .02 per 1% RH and 1 degree F.
If you’re immunocompromised and absolutely cannot risk getting it, now is the time to use all your quarantine because the risk is probably getting relatively lower over time.
In the US we’re probably not quite at peak risk, but it is likely that the peak happens sometime in the next month.
It depends on a number of factors (e.g. if you have to be outside in public all day anyway, might as well go grocery shopping too). Keep in mind that the local confirmed case count is both naturally lagging behind actual cases, and probably undercounted by a lot (especially in the US).
I expect that food won’t actually become scarce, though there could conceivably be rationing and long lines in stores like Italy has right now.
Overall I’m trying to do my shopping at a time when there are not yet many corona cases walking around, but also not too many panic shoppers emptying the shelves. Once I think this no longer applies, I’ll use my stockpile. If the worst comes to worse, I hope the state can manage to keep me supplied.
If you are in a high risk group (older smoker) then use them now to avoid public places.
Use 2/3 of your stores, then order more to be delivered at home (wear a mask and gloves when receiving the packages, let the packages sit for a day, then disinfect it with alcohol, open and disinfect each individual package again).
Are you serious? Wait 24 hours and then disinfect it anyway? Why do you have to wait if you’re disinfecting? I understand transmission from surfaces is very rare anyway.
If there are packages sealed from the manufacturer can’t you just open everything and then wash your hands?
I read viVI_IViv’s comment as a joke making fun of people over-preparing for the virus.
Whose fault is the testing slow down? I have no idea, but some possibilities:
1) CDC/Trump Admin: If it’s the case that they can and should remove some of the regulatory framework slowing down tests.
2) Regulations: If it’s the case that we’re overregulated and nobody can legally waive the regulations.
3) Nobody: If its the case that (a) we’re not actually that far off everybody else in testing, (b) unregulated testing countries are getting a lot of bad tests/infecting people with hepatitis or something, and/or (c) its really the fault of shortages in reagents or something outside of government control.
From what I’ve seen:
1. FDA:
– Invoked emergency regulations allowing them to regulate laboratory-developed tests that normally labs can use on their own, then used this power to block all testing except the use of CDC test kits that did not exist. Has now loosened these rules, and is finally starting to approve commercial tests, but totally unnecessarily caused most of the delay.
– Has failed to (or at least moved unreasonably slowly in) waiving pre-existing red tape to get manufacturing capacity and lab capacity on board for this and other necessary things.
2. CDC:
– Decided to develop their own test protocol instead of (NOT in addition to) using the WHO one – delay of about 2 weeks.
– Screwed up production of initial test kits – delay of another 2-3 weeks
– Couldn’t fix test kits for weeks. Eventually testing started by just discarding the part of the test kit that didn’t work (which could have been done immediately, but wasn’t) – delay of another 2-3 weeks
– Specified a specific RNA amplification kit for use in the tests, which there isn’t an adequate supply of
– Didn’t exercise any positive leadership or show any evidence of having planned for this situation, which is their job. The whole point of having a CDC is to not be starting from zero figuring these things out when a disease hits.
3. Administration
– Didn’t do anything to fix the above problems
– Spent a bunch of time downplaying and ignoring the problem (mostly this has delayed adoption of social distancing rather than testing, though)
As far as I can tell, if the whole Federal government had just stopped coming to work Jan 1, we would be way ahead on response to this.
Trump literally fired and dismantled the Pandemic planning team two years ago. Hence no plan.
Trump didn’t fire them, John Bolton did. My current theory is this was his longterm plan to trigger regime change in Iran.
Because you can see a plausible route from one to the other, or because all of John Bolton’s actions are long term plans to trigger regime change?
More the latter than the former.
Never a bad guess! 🙂
This is a weird statement. John Bolton wasn’t some unaccountable loose cannon; he was Trump’s National Security Adviser. As far as I can tell, Bolton had the mandate (either personally or from Trump) to reduce the size/complexity of the office of the national security adviser and he accomplished that be shitcanning the pandemic team.
I mean, it’s conceivable that Trump probably wasn’t personally involved in the decision of what teams to keep and which to get rid of, but it’s been a well-established norm that if you are president and the people you hire take action, you have responsibility for said action.
@Aftagley
I get and agree that Trump is ultimately responsible in a lot of ways for what his administration does. Still, I think we should distinguish what an allegedly competent person in Trump’s administration does from what Trump the contradictory loose cannon does.
Ah, my apologies. I missed the “literally” in Thomas Jorgensen’s original post which would prompt your corrective reply.
The pandemic response team was a part of the national security counsel and not CDC right? What was their role or would it be?
Happy to add that to the list too, but surely the absence of an NSC planning team doesn’t excuse CDC or FDA from having some kind of idea what they are doing.
I also don’t want to discount the impact of preexisting regulation and the general attitude in our culture that doing nothing is better than doing something imperfectly. But the agencies involved mostly did have the discretion to do a lot better than they did.
The optics of that suck. I could easily believe it wrecked things. But what is the actual path from not having that team and the poor response we have?
Much as I would like to blame Trump, and even more so John Bolton, for this, no. The team that was fired/reassigned, worked above the CDC at the White House /NSC level. If you’re looking for someone to blame for e.g. not having observers in Wuhan last December, or for blindsiding our European allies with the travel and trade and oops no just travel ban with the EU, then sure. But having adequate test kits, supplies, and testing plans on hand, is internal to the CDC.
Also, if the CDC is going to claim that they are excused from being adequately prepared to track local transmission of infectious diseases in American communities just because they don’t have a “pandemic planning group” with a seat on the National Security Council, then also no. That’s basically their core mission, and something that they should be planning for internally at every branch and level. If not that, then why do we even have a CDC? Wait, wait, I know – something about the scourge of vaping, or was it gun violence?
They got distracted, forgot what they were for, and failed – and as near as I can tell, they’d been doing that since before Trump was even a viable candidate for office.
Yeah, I’m pretty convinced. The fault lies first with the FDA and CDC for not responding appropriately, and secondarily (but still significantly) with the Trump administration for not recognizing there was a problem and responding sooner and more effectively.
It is also a relevant fact that the NSC only had a specific pandemic planning team starting in 2016 or so. There is no reason to believe, absent further information, that the purview of those particular members of the NSC was not absorbed by other members of the NSC.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/12/814881355/white-house-knew-coronavirus-would-be-a-major-threat-but-response-fell-short
This is NPR so the usual suspects will say it’s biased and ignore it. And I would say to add a few extra grains of salt (in addition to the normal NPR grains of salt I apply) because we don’t have a direct quote, just an “understanding.” But according to Diamond, through Secretary Azar,
I haven’t bought into this completely, but it fits previous patterns where, for example, Trump talked about keeping the numbers down by keeping the Grand Princess off-shore.
This is actually a perfect example of what @Conrad Honcho was talking about downthread in terms of damning Trump regardless of what he does.
Trump both should have relied on the CDC/FDA experts more and should’ve overridden the CDC/FDA experts and told them to do something different with tests.
You can’t both override the CDC and rely on them and get it right unless you have perfect hindsight.
Trump ignores experts and bureaucrats all the time, including the ones he appoints. He picks and chooses which and when and is accountable for those decisions.
He’s down-played the threat in remarks for the past two months while appearing more concerned with how the market would react than containing the virus. When faced with the option to take longer to start testing and do less of it vice a more aggressive approach that would result in a higher number of identified cases, he opted for the former.
This isn’t motivated reasoning or hindsight. There were people shouting from the rooftops for at least a month that the lack of testing in the US was dangerous.
@matthewravery, that doesn’t address the specific point EchoChaos was making. He’s right to point out that people have been both saying that Trump should have listened to his experts, and at the same time overridden other expert’s plans. If he overroad the FDA and opened testing up to all companies and it ended up with a bunch of false positives and negatives and slowed down the response, people would have blasted him for not listening to his experts at the FDA.
It’s alleged (but not yet proven, I want more information) that the agencies were operating to Trump’s wishes by slow-rolling testing, in order to keep the numbers down.
We don’t know why, at all, the US declined to use the WHO test. This is a major issue. Was it a conscious decision at all? If they sat down, guessed they had more time than they did, and were just wrong, that’s one thing. But we shouldn’t retcon excuses that they didn’t have at the time.
I feel like most politicians/higher ups had some of this “but panic will hurt my polling numbers/the economy” thing going on, which is not good but doesn’t surprise me. Most think in terms of self-interest, and Trump is sensitive to how he comes across, but I think that’s normal for presidents. It was probably bolstered by wishful, motivated thinking that this really wasn’t a big deal. I think it was more short-term than November-oriented—the entire plan would backfire if he knew the risks but held back because it would hurt the economy/his reputation, because it was only a matter of weeks until it was out of control.
I think people are trying to argue he didn’t take it seriously enough because of self-interested and motivated reasoning, and convinced himself he could keep it under control and it would never become an issue. This is a huge problem, but I’m not convinced Trump being president is making much of a difference. Of course, he still bears most of the responsibility, but I think most higher ups in government, business, and media have an unhealthy fear of disruption and shared such thinking. Many are quickly sliding into making it seem like a diabolical plot where he knew it would get out of control but wasn’t willing to act because it would hurt his numbers. That doesn’t make sense. This unwillingness to take action and prepare properly is a longer-term, broader issue.
ETA: I don’t believe there is conspiracy against Trump on this issue, but the questions asked in the press conferences were at times ridiculously leading, and spurred his much-condemned responses. “Are you being selfish by refusing to be tested?” etc. Given everything else that has gone on, I understood why he pushed back, but he shouldn’t be directing blame elsewhere right now. Although, I guess since Biden is going after him, he has to respond, but he probably shouldn’t.
Why did the FDA do that?
Take your pick:
– Standard bureaucratic stubbornness and indifference
– Orders from on high to keep numbers down and make Trump look good
– Deep State conspiracy to make Trump look bad
The country is going to spend the next eight months arguing about whether it’s #2 or #3. It’s most likely to be #1 but that doesn’t fit anybody’s narrative (sit down, libertarians, there are too few of you to matter).
Well, at least one person was expecting/hoping-for something worse than COVID-19: our old pal the prophet-o-doom, Peter Watts:
He does link to something I haven’t seen discussed before, a declassified US DOD document discussing what to do about an influenza pandemic.
Minor Quibble: The document isn’t declassified, it’s unclassified.
Reading this document reinforced why I don’t like dealing with DoD. When they are talking about ways to disrupt the enemy’s center of gravity when the enemy is the influenza, you know someone has drunk a bit too much cool-aid over at the pentagon.
Instead we got Mike Pence leading the task force — a man who doesn’t believe in evolution. Believing in evolution isn’t a boon for all tasks, but seems like it’s relevant to a disease that did evolve, is evolving, and will evolve, all with societal impacts.
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=844_1471558058
As far as I understand, people that don’t believe in evolution are fine with all observable evolution (like viruses), but are skeptical about macroevolution, and in particular about humans evolving from monkeys.
In fact, most Young Earth Creationsists (at least the more scientifically minded types at the DI or AIG, as opposed to “fossils were planted by Satan” types) believe that evolution works even faster than standard evolutionary theory would suggest.
Though this seems like a bit of a contridiciton, it all falls down on the “Young” portion of “Young Earth Creationist.” YEC biological theory holds that instead of a “tree of life” model of biological history you instead have a “forest of life” with God creating many different animal “kinds” that went on to evolve and diverge into different species. For example, there would have been one “cat” kind that eventually evolved into all the different cat species we see today, from the common house-cat to the mighty lion. Since YECs also hold that the Earth is 12,000 years old at maximum, this requires evolution to work very quickly to create new species. I remember reading news reports on Answers in Genesis crowing every time some scientist discovered a species rapidly evolving.
All of this is moot, of course, but I like talking about things I know.
Mike Pence leading the task force — a man who doesn’t believe in evolution
Okay, this is the last straw, I am throwing down on this. Can we get some goddamn evidence for this, apart from “I’m a lefty who wouldn’t dream of using stereotypes about any group except when it comes to my outgroup”? Because I’m seeing a lot of this floating around in various contexts, but can anyone tell me that Pence is actually a Young Earth Creationist?
All I know is that he was reared Catholic then converted to Evangelicalism, and I’m even shaky on what exactly he converted to. Can we get some actual statements of the kind of either a doctrinal confession of whatever church or denomination he now belongs to, or from the man’s mouth himself?
I mean, I don’t believe in evolution if you have a broad enough definition of what it means to “believe in evolution”(and yet this did not stop me doing vocational training in becoming a laboratory technician back in my youth). Am I a Young Earth Creationist? No. Do I believe that materialism is a sufficient explanation for “and that’s how we got the universe, life, and humans”? Also no. So first define for me what exactly and precisely you mean by “believe in evolution” and not in the shallow “I effin’ love Science!” way I see this type of insult being thrown around.
Because it reminds me of nothing so much as P.Z. Myers’ sour grapes over Francis Collins – how very dare some filthy rotten religious believer get a plum job at the Human Genome Project when Myers, a superior Bright, was stuck teaching in a Minnesota cow college? (Bonus irony, in light of what Wikipedia calls the Eucharist incident, that UMM started off as a religious school: “The first campus buildings housed an American Indian boarding school, first administered by the Sisters of Mercy order of the Catholic Church and later by the United States Government.”)
I think Pence is unfortunate in that he appears to have what is called “resting bitch face”; back when he was swearing in that bisexual Arizona senator, there were 101 Tumblr posts and other social media posts gloating about “look at his face! he must be raging! she’s everything he hates!” with accompanying photos of grave/stony-faced Pence administering the oath, but nobody reblogging the photos where they were smiling and friendly/civil to one another.
So yeah, I’m about sick to the back teeth at this stage of “religious believer = NO SCIENCE, WILL NOT BELIEVE DOCTORS, WILL RECOMMEND PRAYER INSTEAD OF MEDICINE” crap popping up just to make a partisan polarised political point.
Here’s the quote from an speech on the floor a few years back:
Like all Pence quotes, anyone can see whatever they want in it. Lefty’s will see it as a denial of science, YECs will see it as a politician boldly coming out against evolution and people (like you, I’m assuming) will see it as him affirming the possibility of guided design.
Anyway, that’s not the real reason to object to Mike Pence leading this response. The real reason is that in his previous role as governor he failed to adequately respond to a public health crisis because time and time again he refused to take necessary action because he was either blinded by ideology just because it would have been politically unpopular with his base.
Given that the most direct criticism of the current government response is that it has been more aimed at keeping approval ratings high than actually solving the problem, putting someone who has previously put politics over public health is demoralizing.
I believe that God created the known universe, the earth, and everything in it including man
I believe that myself. The rest about intelligent design? A bunch of Thomists have disputed that, so that’s good enough for me. (Let them do the theological heavy lifting so I don’t have to, is my motto).
As to the rest of it, if you don’t like the guy because he’s part of an administration that’s opposite to your political inclinations, that’s fine. We all work that way. But don’t drag religion into it unless you know for sure that he or anyone else has based policy decisions on a particular doctrinal understanding. Incompetence, inertia, and contradictory advice from sources all touting their own expertise are enough to do the work there.
For instance, the Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister is today calling for school closures after just last night standing in agreement with the First Minister, Arlene Foster, that such would not be necessary. Part of it is because we in the Republic closed our schools and colleges. Arlene herself is not happy Leo never mentioned this to her, but listen girl, we only found out ourselves by listening to the morning news, our lot didn’t even send out a heads-up via the Departments of Health or Education to schools. This is the kind of “yes/no/maybe” flapping about that does not need to be explained by holding a position on evolution, it’s ordinary “right hand not knowing what left hand is doing”. Yeah it’s not good enough for the situation, but it’s the kind of human mess and muddle that always happens in such situations.
Thanks for posting this. The meme about Pence being unfit to lead the task force because of his views on evolution is the worst kind of political meme. Your in-group gets a few laughs, you all pat yourself on the back, but everyone else thinks you’re being ridiculous and missing the point completely. The result just entrenches partisanship and eliminates real discussion.
The reason to be skeptical of Pence as the head of the effort is because of how he dealt with the HIV outbreak in his home state. The optimistic case is, he belatedly reversed course after an initially disastrous response. Perhaps he’s internalized some lessons from that and things will go better this time.
I guess/hope but to my knowledge he’s never made a public reckoning with the ramifications of his decisions.
For the past generation at least, Vice Presidents are often put in charge of things like this. “Pence” is not even on my top-5 of worries about the coronavirus.
Are we talking about you or Mike Pence?
And! for those of you who can’t bother your arse figuring out what exactly a particular set of Christians may or may not believe, but sure any stick will do to beat the dog, aren’t they all fundies anyway?
I did some digging on your (and my) behalf, so when we’re slinging insults around, at least we’ll be using the correct ones.
Pence was raised Irish Catholic Democrat. Going away to college, like so many other young people, was the catalyst for a change in belief: that’s where he converted to Evangelicalism.
Up to around 2013, if I go by Wikipedia, he and his family attended Grace Evangelical Church. Looking them up, their website helpfully indicates that “Grace Evangelical Church affirms the doctrinal position of the Evangelical Free Church of America as in the EFCA Statement of Faith. We also agree with the Evangelical Free Church of America’s Distinctives”. Bippity-boppity-booing my way along to the Evangelical Free Church of America, I get the impression that they’re Reformed in a Presbyterian/Calvinist heritage (though again, Wikipedia tells me the progenitor churches that merged to form the EFCA were Swedish and Norwegian Lutherans), which means Biblical inerrancy along with total depravity and other such good things.
However, that does not indicate any particular stance on evolution, pro- or anti-. Yes, this may shock you, but simply the name “Evangelical” or “Born-again” is not sufficient evidence to know one way or the other.
So I Googled it straightforwardly and here we go:
PLEASE NOTE POINT 10 ABOVE. So, to answer the question, “Does Mike Pence disbelieve in/deny evolution?”, the answer is “I don’t fucking know and neither do you, unless someone asks him straight-out. His former denomination of birth (Catholicism) accepts it; his former church’s non-denominational home (EFCA) doesn’t make any doctrinal requirement about holding a position on it one way or the other. So he need not be a Young Earth Creationist simply because he’s an Evangelical.”
(I swear to God, I never thought I’d be defending a bunch of Calvinist-flavoured heretics. Internet lazy lefty slap-fight prejudice has done more for ecumenism than any amount of Church initiatives).
The issue is that people have asked him straight out, and like everything else he dodges the question. See this interview from with 2009 with MSNBC’s most recent castaway:
So… does he or does he not? That certainly sounds like someone trying to avoid answering a question. If he did, he could pretty easily say, “I believe in evolution acting as God’s instrument” or whatever. He deliberately doesn’t; from this, it’s clearly possible to conclude that either he doesn’t believe in evolution, or he’s willing to signal that he doesn’t in order to gain the support of those who don’t.
Also, you’re giving US Catholicism too much credit here wrt knowing/following church teachings. Pew polling from 2013 suggested that somewhere between 20-30% of US Catholics didn’t believe in evolution, and that’s tracked my personal experience.
Is that the issue? Do you think this affects his view on epidemiology?
FWIW, his response sounds rather humble. It could be dodging the question, a rather commonplace political sin, or it could be that he hasn’t looked deeply into it. I agree with whoever else posted that there aren’t many creationists so ardent they disbelieve in novel viral/bacteria strains.
Do I think his religious/political (i don’t normally conflate the two, but for him it’s appropriate) have the potential to affect his decisions when handling a public-health crisis? Yes.
From the Lancet:
Check out that Politico piece I linked in the previous comment. When he was governor he refused to take action that would have saved lives.
Did now. It says nothing about evolution. Basically, you’re using “creationist” as a stand-in for “anti-drug” or possibly “anti-gay”. I don’t think the correlation is that tight, and you might as well say the part relevant.
Or possibly you are misreading this:
I do not read this as Pence thinking prayer was a suitable cure for an outbreak. Translated, this is Pence saying he would consider what actions to take. Perhaps you feel he should always defer to experts on important matters. I disagree, but it isn’t unreasonable. But this isn’t Pence thinking prayer would get him out of the situation; this is Pence looking for guidance on how to balance two potentially competing values, the recommended approach to the virus and not wanting to condone drug use as an official.
I think the drug enforcement has had enough unintended negative side effects to make me think we should probably toss it and giving deference to it here was not a credit to Pence, to be clear, but let’s understand that from your article that’s what was motivating Pence, not a disbelief in the transformative power of random mutation and natural selection.
@Randy M
I think we’re having orthogonal discussions. I have two claims:
1. Mike Pence possibly doesn’t believe in evolution.
2. Mike Pence’s previous failures responding to public health crises and his seeming unwillingness to learn from that experience make him a bad candidate for the government’s top man handling this crisis.
I think I agree with you that point 1 has absolutely no bearing on his ability to respond to this crisis. He can believe that we all came down from the moon 20 years ago for all I care.
I posted this up-thread, but I’ll post it again:
I read about the HIV scandal a few years ago. My understanding of what happened is:
1) some folks recommended Pence as governor authorize giving out needles to reduce spread of HIV;
2) he considered it and decided not to, because he’d be encouraging the lifestyle, etc.;
3) people intervened pleading with him to support the policy, anyway, including the local Catholic bishop;
4) he… didn’t do it anyway, even though he couldn’t justify his opposition to it.
It’s one thing to have principles, of course. It’s another thing to literally be unable to explain why you won’t do this. The source I read was definitely not friendly to Pence (I thought it was the New Yorker, so take with a grain of salt: what irked me was that Pence could not even explain his reason for opposing it, but n.b. that’s the sort of thing a very partial journalist could easily slant.
Because he is able to Motte and Bailey his responses does not mean there is no reason to be concerned his view on science and afterlife may interfere with duties. This is only a little about what he believes, but a lot more about what he doesn’t believe.
@Aftagley
I’m having the discussion that came from:
and got Deiseach’s druthers all up or down or whichever way druthers shouldn’t be.
You pointed back again to that article as if it pertains to this discussion in particular, and reading it, it doesn’t seem to.
I almost posted in response to your reply to her that I agreed with this:
(I didn’t respond because I don’t know the story apart from what you posted.)
It’s perfectly fair to criticize his earlier handling and object to him being involved because he opposed sharing needles in response to the Indiana HIV spread. But this thread related that specifically to his belief in evolution, which, apart from being a bit opaque as you pointed out, really seems to be entirely irrelevant and basically a smear on Christians.
Because if there’s one thing religious people are known for, it’s letting sick people die because, hey, Heaven, right?
@Nick,
I’m loathe to nit-pick this point because hesitancy in a crisis is about as bad as doing nothing, but Aftagley’s article says this, implying he got around to it eventually:
Perhaps that what you meant, and late is as good as never? I dunno the details.
@Randy M
I finally found the article: it was this one from Jane Mayer. It looks like I confused two cases: one where Pence refused to let a Syrian refugee family resettle in Indiana, but his reason was the weaksauce “I need to protect the people of the state,” the other where, as you say, he supported the needle program after a time. Pretty embarrassing mistake on my part, sorry.
@randy m
Yep, you’re correct, I was arguing a side point there.
I don’t think I have anything else to add to this discussion so I’ll bow out.
@Nick
Syrian/Syringe it’s basically the same. 😉
What’s the saying, history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes?
@Aftagley
Fair enough, and I can’t complain about tangents when we agree on what particulars they do or don’t support.
afaik, they are not known for *not* having their faith being the main influence to their worldview, actions, and policy preferences.
you are making a jump form macro to micro that i wasn’t ready for. the following 3 statements could all be simultaneously true
1. someones faith influences their policy preferences
2. someone has a preference for people not to die
3. someones policy preferences causes more people to die
so yes, MP probably has a preference for people not to die, but it is useful to know all factors that go into how he makes a decision.
the same can be said for calling leftists baby killers, or saying they want people to die. obviously that is not their preference, though they may have other preferences that are in opposition to that.
@Randy M
Heh. I really am very embarrassed, though; I usually don’t open my mouth about what I half-remember, but since I couldn’t find the article and I have a pretty good memory, I summarized. But I turned out to be way off. A lesson in the value of
googleduck duck fu.@meh
Perhaps incorrectly, but this was the inference I took from your reference to afterlife in the context of Pence’s role in handling disaster.
Sure, but people are complex and prone to rationalize and compartmentalize. More useful to look at results.
And in the at least one case, it seems that Pence’s results were incorrect, or at least delayed, perhaps for reasons relating to faith (presumably he believes drugs are immoral for religious reasons), but ones that seemed only tenuously correlated with evolution or an afterlife at most.
I think the assumptions you and the op are making are about as fair as saying “Don’t vote for an atheist, they don’t believe they are answerable to a higher power and will thus abuse their power.”
Something that’s fairly commonly said, probably only rarely true, and basically never charitable or reliable as a predictive model.
Agreed with Randy.
The mapping of “publicly religious” to “doesn’t believe in evolution” and “doesn’t believe in evolution” to “unfit for any labor more complex than busing tables” is incredibly uncharitable, to say the least.
and got Deiseach’s druthers all up or down or whichever way druthers shouldn’t be.
Randy M., at this hour of my life, my druthers like everything else are probably heading South 🙂
Anyway, that’s not the real reason to object to Mike Pence leading this response. The real reason is that in his previous role as governor he failed
Good. Fair enough. That’s the kind of reason for having a go at the man that I wanted to see. Snarky remarks about evolution just sound like you want to use any stick to beat the dog because he’s one of those horrid awful fundamentalists, and as I said – there’s a selection of us on here who don’t “believe in evolution” the way the “I fuckin’ LOVE Science!!!!” crowd “believe in evolution”, which is not to say we don’t believe viruses mutate or that medical advice needs to be followed.
Dander is the thing that gets gotten up, and maybe down again provided you’re not Irish. Druthers are what you have if you get your own way.
@Paul Zrimsek
You’re right, thanks for the correction.
Not the crowd to be sloppy with, I oughta know that.
I don’t have direct evidence for Pence’s religious ideology affecting his handling of the epidemic. But I had the same reaction – he’s likely to expect prayer to be more effective than social distancing, and personally lack the knowledge required to comprehend what the public health people tell him.
Of course Pence is not just a religious believer – he’s someone who’s using his religious affiliation to enhance his political status. And he’s doing it in the US, which is full of people who are religiously motivated to not just reject large chunks of modern biology, but to attempt to prevent it being taught.
Maybe religious people – and especially religious politicians – in Ireland are a bit saner, on average. In the US, some of them are living in cloud cuckoo land.
he’s likely to expect prayer to be more effective than social distancing
Y’know, as an anthropological essay in how the other half lives, I am finding this conversation hella educational.
You non-believers really have that quaint old-fashioned gollywog view of believers? There is nothing to say that we can’t equally believe “social distancing” and “prayer” are both good and should be used.
I don’t know what the man is like. As I said, digging into his past church, it sounds Reformed. But the comments on here are making it sound like ye think he’s a mix of prosperity Gospel and snake-handling – and I don’t think that is so.
Okay, darn it, as Oscar Wilde said “I can resist everything except temptation” and here goes: the attitude to prayer in time of sickness has goaded me to post here the Novena prayer to St Raphael the Archangel. You too can use this instead of panic-buying every bottle of hand sanitiser in the shop! 🙂 (I’ll throw in a link to a prayer invoking Ss. Cosmas and Damian – two for the price of one, no price gouging here!)
At Mass on Sunday I’m going to ask Father to bless my bottle of Purell. Holy Hand Sanitizer.
“Thou shalt count to three as thou washest thy hands. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.”
Precisely. He’s an evangelical, IIRC, whatever his upbringing, and in the US that starts at “the Bible is literally true, dictated by God Himself” and gets farther from reality in the more extreme examples. To be fair, there’s a sub-group of Evangelicals that make a serious attempt to square their literally true bible belief with observations made by the senses and brain they believe their god gave them; it’s possible he belongs to that group. And being human, most evangelicals compartmentalize some of the time, and routinely do things against what they claim they believe.
Some of them even manage to be successful in STEM fields. But that wouldn’t be the type who go into politics.
I’m afraid Pence sits at the overlap of two groups I generally despise – or maybe 3 such groups.
Deiseach on the other hand does not. I disagree with her religion, but she isn’t in politics, doesn’t have power over me, and hasn’t shown signs of hiding her head in the sand while covering her ears and singing “la; la; la”. And she’s also not a past master of evasive language who continues to practice regularly – though that’s probably redundant with “politician” ‘-(
This is a silly hyperbole of why believers of various theisms pray. Believers don’t do things like pray instead of eating because they think that prayer is more effective at nourishing you than food. They pray before eating to ask for guidance, give thanks, etc.
Same for praying and then instituting government policy or whatever.
Mostly. There are still loons (like whoever disliked lightning rods for diverting God’s judgement), but I’m not sure they are more of a problem than other types of loons anymore although it varies from place to place.
@DinoNerd
Between this and past statements of yours, I’m not convinced you have any real knowledge of what the people you despise actually believe.
This is verified on the google machine. I’m not sure what you are raging about?
> Can we get some goddamn evidence for this
Did you watch the video I linked to? It’s pretty clear.
Also, I’m not a “lefty”.
It might seem like it, but it really isn’t. As others have noted, Christians in general are very good at keeping their beliefs about what may or may not have happened in 4004 BC out of their understanding of what is happening today.
And, while there may be other reasons to be suspicious of Pence’s leadership on this issue, or even something in his particular understanding of Christianity, when someone opens with any sort of simplistic bigotry then it poisons the whole rest of the discussion and nobody is going to care about the other, possibly more important stuff.
English translation of a leaked CCP document on how to win the “information war on internet”.
Link to downloadable images here (english) and here (chinese).
Mostly standard authoritarian playbook stuff.
Twitter is down at the moment so I can’t see the tweet. What’s the provenance of this leak? How confident should we be that it’s genuine?
Source here: https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/
Pinged the chinese blogger that leaked the images RE source, no response yet. (Will keep this post updated if/when she responds.) FWIW (a) I’ve found that her blog corresponds well to BBC reporting, (b) the phrasing of the documents is similar to the phrasing of other CCP documents.
The imgur links have a copy of the documents. Here’s a transcription of the text:
TRANSCRIBED FROM THE TRANSLATED IMAGES:
CAC (Cyberspace Administration of China) Internal Documentation for Internet Commentators (no spreading)
The War of Internet public opinion is of vital important to the life and death of the regime of the People’s Republic of China. For the prosperity and strength of our motherland and the revitalization of the Chinese nation, all online commentators should always be prepared to defend the country’s Internet firewall with their intelligence and diligence.
METHODS:
During working hours, online commentators must check their work email at least once every hour so as to grasp the latest spirit in the instructions from their superiors.
Online commentators ought to cooperate as per request. When needed, work teams consist of commentators from different regions and professions will be formed to implement specific tasks. If necessary, superiors will transfer personnel from other groups to understaffed teams.
Basic working procedures: the routine work for each group only focuses on specific websites. Different groups are held accountable for relevant forums of different major websites. The daily work serves to defend the correct guidance of public opinion according to the overall guidelines. In case of a sudden public opinion outbreak, the routine work should be suspended. Instead, commentators should follow the instructions of special working teams in superior departments. The staff and resources should be devoted to the guidance of public opinion on the emergency.
Online Commentators should be skillful in concealing their real identities. They must have multiple different usernames, with which they need to post articles in various styles of writing. If required, members of different working teams can pretend to be netizens who are debating in forums. Then, the third party can forward strong evidence to guide the public opinion in it’s favor.
When rumors are spreading in the cyberspace, commentators should find the original post and the publisher as soon as possible. Commentators should compel the website administrators to delete the original post. Then, commentators should copy and post the content of the deleted post and use another IP address to declare themselves as local citizens in which the rumor took place. Then, commentators should use the account of forum moderators or other netizens to point out that the IP address does not belong to the area where the rumor was referring to, thus proving the message a canard.
If needed, commentators can post fake news that is more sensational to capture the attention of netizens. Then, commentators should soon clarify that those pieces of information are purely rumors.
On some popular forums where the credibility of netizens is usuallly high, commentators should go make a mess. Commentators can intervene by posting ambiguous articles, distort viewpoints irrationally in their comments, incite misunderstandings, and debates to distract the netizens’ attention from some issues.
It is difficult to gain control of the public opinion on websites overseas. When commentators fail to dominate the public opinion on foreign forums, they can use short, irrational, and meaningless posts to space the forum. When the screen is flooded with a pointless mess, netizens are likely to lose interest. In this way, commentators can prevent reactionary ideologies from public dissemination.
To meet the basic qualifications of an “internet commentator,” one has to continuously learn to improve their writing skills, and learn to grasp several writing styles while mastering the art of imitating others’ writing.
Learn to communicate effectively with fellow netizens, earn their trust and blend in with them, especially so for those whose articles are influential online. Get a position as the host to crucial online forums, when possible.
Be highly vigilant when hunting for posts to work with. Using your judgement to quickly find the posts, among million others, with high potentials of influence, and focus heavy emphasis on them.
EDIT: Previous post complained about forum eating posts. Answer: transcript was too long (thanks nornagest!) Moved it to pastebin attached.
Source here. Pinged the chinese blogger that published the docs for source, no response so far, will update if I get one.
FWIW: (a) following her blog, her posts have corresponded well with BBC reporting, (b) the phrasing of the chinese is similar to other CCP documents.
In case twitter still down, wrote a transcript here.
There might be, but it’s pretty high. The spam filter will eat your comment if it contains a lot of links, though, or one of several words and phrases that our rightful caliph has deemed inappropriate (see “Comments” link in the site header).
EDIT: Previous post complained about forum eating posts. Answer: transcript was too long (thanks nornagest!) Moved it to pastebin attached.
Source here. Pinged the chinese blogger that published the docs for source, no response so far, will update if I get one.
FWIW: (a) following her blog, her posts have corresponded well with BBC reporting, (b) the phrasing of the chinese is similar to other CCP documents.
In case twitter still down, wrote a transcript here.
what chance do we give that at least one major ssc commenter is govt backed?
I’m skeptical of this piece’s legitimacy as an actual CCP set of instructions for a couple of reasons:
1. Who is the intended audience for this document? It doesn’t seem anywhere near detailed enough to be a resource for new employees. On the other hand, it’s way too specific to be for anything else.
2. It seems to include a bunch of phrases that are hyper-focused on attracting the attention of a western audience. Look at lines like:
or
or
Again, I can’t imagine an instruction manual including these terms. Maybe this is an artifact of motivated translation, but I feel like I’m supposed to read this and get angry, which makes me question its legitimacy.
3. The person who tweeted this out is a Falon Gong activist currently in exile in Australia, unless wikipedia is incorrect. Now, I agree that the Falon Gong have been treated reprehensibly by the Chinese government, but they aren’t great sources. They will pass along the story that presents the CCP in the worst possible light, truth be damned.
All in all, the things described in this text may be happening, but I don’t trust this to be a legitimate source. I’ll keep looking and see if I can find where it came from.
Also, toukmond, it wasn’t that your transcript was too long, it was that it contained some banned words.
Completely fair points! Illuminating analysis.
It seems awfully short for a written set of instructions. Is the CCP just sitting random nerds down in front of computers, handing them this sheet of paper, and letting them loose?
Seems like basic “how to disrupt the Internet” info like this would be conveyed to you by your manager, or senior team members, or a training class or something. I’d expect at least like a 15 page pamphlet if not an entire book to make it worth writing down.
On the other hand, I don’t know anything about how people get organized in China, maybe that really is how they do it.
> What are your forecasts for unemployment and GDP growth by the end of the year?
Unemployment (U3) > 5.5%. Not sure about GDP.
> Not “it’s entirely possible that a recession could happen,” but ranges/numbers/probabilities.
I’m about 90% sure that we’re in some kind of recession right now.
> Do you think that a coronavirus-triggered recession will be a decisive factor in the general election?
Decisive? Maybe. I think it’ll be a significant factor, but the oil war might actually be larger in terms of impact. The oil war will worsen\extend the pre-existing manufacturing recession, which will have an outsize impact in the Rust Belt. I actually think this was a significant part of why Hillary lost in 2016.
The oil price war means that oil, which is an input to lots of activities, is cheap. Why would you expect that to make things worse? It’s bad for oil companies and companies that produce drilling supplies and the like, but I would expect it to be good for almost everyone else.
Oil will be cheaper, but it’s not the most expensive input in most sectors, AFAIK. We’ve already been through this song and dance routine before, in 2015/2016, when the Saudis tried to kill shale oil. The US labor market continued to improve throughout that time period, but unemployment rates in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan all increased Y/Y. In certain areas, there was a definite decrease in economic activity that correlated well with the decrease in oil prices. The US is probably more economically dependent on domestic oil production now than it was in 2016, and the shale industry is even more indebted, so I expect that this go-around will be worse.
We had some discussion about this a quarter thread ago: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/08/open-thread-149/#comment-862805
What is the likeliest endgame for Scientology? What sequence of events will likely unfold leading to the organization’s demise, and how long will it take to go extinct?
That’s an optimistic perspective, given the proven longevity of various other…similar organizations.
Generally with this sort of thing you expect to see a long tail. Remember there’s still a handful of people who think the Third Reich was a good idea.
I’m betting that in a hundred years it’ll just be a particularly weird subsect of Christianity.
My money’s on it being bought out by Disney.
I can’t wait for the kids’ musical version of Battlefield Earth. They will need to add a princess, though.
@Nick >
What isn’t better with an extra princess?
@Plumber
The first princess. Two are too many, three’s a crowd, and four your dead.
@proyas
Child and/or sexual abuse scandal?
They have deep financial reserves and have been investigating heavily in real estate, building huge “Ideal Orgs” that stand empty. I see a slow decline as their membership dies off, they are not able to recruit new members and don’t even try anymore. When their leader, David Miscavige, dies it will set off a massive power struggle as he wields absolute power in the organization.
I think they are in fact more vulnerable than other religions. Most religions make use of ancientness, pre-modernity, traditionalism as part of their package; the deep-past perspective helps them keep a grip on the minds. Scientology is intentionally different, they are very “modern” and sci-fi-ish, which makes them look and sound dated and silly already, and this will get worse with time as we move farther away from the spirit of 1950s-1960s.
But the main vulnerability of scientology is their greed and materiality. They’ve always been a get-rich-quick scheme, and are not even hiding this all that much. In an abundance economy where being much richer than average is a burden, not a pleasure (and we’re already moving in that direction), scientology will not survive. Managing a capital will be universally looked upon as hard work for not much personal reward – much like holding formal power already is, at some levels and in some places. Think of being elected head of a council in some small municipality: no fame, no perks, just extra work and responsibility, constant ridicule, loss of privacy; in such places you need to actually persuade people to run for the post. My (optimistic) theory is that this aversion to power and riches will gradually spread to the highest levels, even if that may take a couple centuries. And among other evils, this will get rid of scientology too.
Ideological victory when Xenu comes for the rest of us?
Scientology doesn’t have the gravitas of a real religion, or even something like the Boy Scouts of America. It doesn’t have a legitimate (as opposed to merely legal) means of succession. It also has a long history of behavior that isn’t going to hold up to scrutiny in the age of #MeToo. I’m not going to predict the particular form of scandal that will bring it down, save that if it comes in the next five years probably something sexual. But scandals happen, and Scientology hasn’t the depth to survive them the way e.g. the Catholic Church does.
As toastengineer says, you’ll still have a few true believers for a long time. But subunity replacement, laughable public stature, and most of the organization’s assets going to the lawyers and the state.
I’ve posted a lot about my thoughts on the current market situation, so I thought I would share how I have structured our current finances anticipating a market drop and recession (though not specifically the virus and the size and speed of things). Feel free to ask any questions at all and I will give the best (non professional non advice) that I can.
Asset allocation:
401k entirely Treasury bonds since October 2019.
Gold Roughly 5/8ths the value of the 401k
Property: Twin home with half rented half lived in. If we had sold last summer our net over mortgage debt would probably have been 2.5x-3 our 401k value. I don’t expect to be able to sell for that amount any time soon.
Short positions. Currently the account is 1/8th our 401k value, but only 30% is in active shorts which are on Gold and Silver, but have been in and out of stocks recently.
Some cash, roughly 1/8th the 401k value.
Planned shifts:
Move the 401k from bonds to cash (money market) soon, probably shortly after the 10 year breaks below 0.5% return.
Remove shorts from Gold/silver and start going long gold with leverage (calls) slowly after I think deleveraging has stopped pushing gold down. Probably a 20-25% draw-down from the recent peak.
I am actually about to buy 30 year treasuries, though our time horizons may differ. The bond yields just spiked up – people are selling treasuries for liquidity (same as gold), but the writing is on the wall, the Fed cuts by 50-100 points during the next meeting, 30 year treasuries do very well.
I am maxed on what bonds I will be holding, am looking to sell after the Fed’s likely rate cut.
Yeah, I am looking to sell around that time as well.
Kind of surprised there hasn’t been any talk here (that I’ve seen) about the $1.5 trillion injection by the Fed?
I don’t know enough about it to have any thoughts whatsoever on what it will/will not accomplish but am definitely interested in the thoughts of more knowledgeable people here.
Cynically, I assume it will mean fat bonuses for those in the banking/finance sector.
Yeah, it kinda got buried with all of the other news yesterday, including the fact that the market still dove. Seemed like a huge step to my eyes, but I don’t know any of the specifics.
It does not appear to be alleviating the funding crunch, which is one reason the Fed also announced a 33 billion QE today with a different set of purchases.
$1.5 trillion is also a weird headline number, the actual maximum is $5.5 trillion before they would start coming due, but the actual subscribed shouldn’t be near that. About $120 billion of the first $500 billion offering has been taken up, and it is unlikely that it will come close to the $1.5 trillion.
My interpretation is that the Fed recognizes that this is a separate issue from the virus as is started last fall, and they are basically promising the markets that there won’t be any over subscribed repos while the virus is still an issue.
I hear that dealers want to use the full repo amounts, but can’t due to regulatory issues (Basel, etc.). I assume this will get solved shortly.
Most of my money is is VTSAX (Vanguard’s total stock market index), which is down 24% for the year so far. While I wish I would have taken more out earlier, at this point I’m thinking of waiting for a temporary “bounce” before diversifying. Is this reasonable, or better just to get out now? Or just hold and hope for the best?
And if diversifying, into what? Bonds funds aren’t dropping as fast, but are generally down as well. Long-term US Treasuries are up — is this trend likely to continue if the stock markets continue to fall? Is there anything else in the Vanguard ecosystem that would be likely to go up if the broad indexes keep going down?
Right now there is a clear push towards cash. Cash is a decent hedge against the value of your etf going down as you can then use it to buy in at a lower level, and going half cash (there should be a money market fund or some equivalent) can act as a hedge now, but is risky against losing upside.
These investment threads on SSC seem to be dominated by aggressive investors, but I think the best approach is to buy diversified stocks and hold them. I think you are at least as likely to miss an uptick in stocks as a decrease. On the average, stocks go up, so on average pulling them out means you are missing an increase. I keep all my funds in various index stock funds and never move them out.
By the way, Bacon said he moved a bunch of money into Treasury Bonds in Oct 2019. I think he missed a very big uptick in stocks at the end of the year. I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to this, so maybe stocks are now below where they were in Oct 2019? If so, not by much. Maybe Bacon makes money in the long run by constantly moving stuff around, but I think I do best by just standing pat. And that’s also a lot easier. I have other ways I’d rather spend my time.
> I keep all my funds in various index stock funds and never move them out.
Buy-and-hold has been my basic strategy for the last 20 years as well. But rightly or wrongly, I’m worried by this current crisis in way that I haven’t been during that time.
> I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to this, so maybe stocks are now below where they were in Oct 2019?
The difference is smaller than I would have guessed, but if we compare VTSAX (Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund) to VLGSX (Vanguard’s Long Term Treasury Index Fund) from Oct 2019 to present, it looks like the “all stock” position would be down about 8%, and the “all treasury” position would be up about 6%: chart
So whether by luck or prudence, even though he missed out on the ~15% run up in stocks from October until February, baconbits9’s move to treasuries currently puts him significantly ahead.
I don’t constantly move things around, the shift into bonds was the first change in our 401k allocation I have made in (I think) 5 years.
Stocks are down significantly since October 2019, the S&P is currently down (with a 9% up day yesterday) ~170 points, or ~ 5.5% from the lowest close in October, and more like 10% from the average close in October while bonds are up 5-7% in value since then, so that one move right now would realize me 10-20% gains over the market if I went back into equities on money, that is 2 years of expected gains, in equities and nothing to sneeze at.
IMO, rebalancing to reach your target allocation is fine, but you shouldn’t change your target asset allocation lightly, and especially not in a crisis. The best investing strategy is to make a plan and stick to it.
Just putting a comment in for people reading this while confused/concerned about the market. Most people who own stock don’t need to sell them anytime soon, unless you are retired/retiring/unemployed don’t worry too much. Also there will be tons of people talking about shorting things or moving to/from cash. Most of those people will lose more than if they just stayed put, unless you definitively know what you are doing not doing anything/continuing to do what you were is much more likely to go well for you.
The above is my slightly condescending/probably not well targeted to the SSC demographic advice that I’m throwing in upon seeing people (really just person as of this writing, but people are like ants…) asking for financial advice in this thread
Thanks. I’m not adjusting my 401k right now; I’m not planning on taking anything out for twenty+ years, and I could imagine it’s a great time or a terrible time to invest, depending. But I was wondering if I’m not being negligent about it.
Where you see one there’s probably more?
Exactly. There is never just one ant.
I would say you are being negligent if 100% of your portfolio is stocks and bonds.
I would say the opposite – if you are investing in stuff other than stocks and bonds, you’re likely making a mistake. (Ignoring stuff like a cash emergency fund of course)
What alternatives do you propose and why do you think they would offer superior diversification/return?
Can I offer you
an eggsome ridiculously 80s nugget in these trying times?Best effort-post summarizing the research on proposed education improvements I’ve seen. Reminds me of a SSC post.
Could you please provide a short summary? The article is not conventiently accessible.
It’s a pretty long article to attempt to summarize, but he covers:
The US spends a lot on education
The US spends more on poor students than non-poor students
Teachers are not underpaid
We don’t have a shortage of teachers
The Achievement Gap is not because of teachers
Having a doctorate or masters does not make you a better teacher
Bad test scores are not (all) because of bad schools
It’s not easy to measure teacher performance
Charter schools are not bad for traditional public schools
Charter school success is not because of cherrypicking students.
Charter School success is not only because of “no excuse” disciplinary policies
Pre-school does not improve academic achievement
Smaller schools and classes are not a fix for the system
Public charter schools don’t hurt minority and poor students
We don’t need to eliminate property-tax-based funding for public schools
It is very difficult to improve teacher quality and professional development does not appear to be effective.
Student evaluations are incredibly biased and are often negatively correlated with teacher quality
and then concludes that we should “start by allowing school districts to pay [teachers] more for high-need subjects and to pay significantly more for high-need schools” and to “get rid of the costly programs that are currently creating issues in finding and retaining good teachers in at-risk districts.” and that “bad” schools are generally the result of inputs (student population they start with) combined with lack of effective school discipline.
Ok, perhaps this will be useful to somebody, those are the orders of the Czech government, which just declared constitutional state of emergency for 30 days:
Schools including universities, but not kindergartens, are closed (happened two days ago).
Border controls with Austria and Germany are to be established. Ministry of Interior will issue order handling details, it will come into effect starting from 15 March.
Foreigners from following countries are banned from entering the country, except for those who already have a residence permit: China, Italy, Iran, South Korea, Spain, Germany (!), France, USA, Switzerland, Norway, Japan, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, UK, Belgium, Austria (!), Greece. Exceptions are to be granted if entry of a foreigner is judged to be in a national interest.
All proceedings regarding visa applications to Czechia are to be halted.
Czech nationals and foreigners living in Czechia on a basis of a permit are banned from traveling to above mentioned countries, except for Czech workers in Austria and Germany.
Foreigners that do not have a residence permit but are here legally (i.e. tourists, business travellers) might stay.
International transport of persons, but not goods, over Czech borders, is to be essentially halted, except for Prague airport, which will stay operational. No trains and no buses with over 9 seats, except for those carrying Czech nationals and foreigners with residential permits back to the country. Exceptions are possible on a case by case basis.
All public or semipublic events with over 30 participants are banned, except for Parliament and court proceedings and similar things. And also except for funerals.
All fastfoods in shopping centers over 5000 square meters are closed, but shopping centers will otherwise remain open.
Fitcenters, public pools, cinemas, libraries etc. are closed.
And, most significantly of all for this beer country, all pubs, restaurants etc. are closed from 8 pm to 6 am.
There are an estimated 30.7 Americans for every Czech (I’m including documented non-citizens etc. in both cases).
Czechia has 115 confirmed cases and 0 deaths.
The United States Center for Disease Control seems to be avoiding testing people, and I don’t know what testing is like in Czechia. The US has 38 deaths and a bit more than 1,400 confirmed cases. It could not possibly be that things are only 13 times as bad in the US. It could be as little as 38X as bad with an estimated 30.7X population (1.24 times as bad per capita).
THEREFORE, either Czechia is overreacting or the United States needs to copy these policies effective March 12 (or earlier!).
I think Czechia has less healthcare capacity / fewer doctors than the US (per capita). The main goal of these measures is to prevent the health system from being overwhelmed.
Germany, Italy and France are recommending similar things to their populace, though so far I think only Italy is actually enforcing them.
The earlier you take measures like these, the fewer infections there will be. But it does hurt the economy and terrify the people. As a politician, it must be really hard to make the call, especially since, if you succeed, the result will be “it was not so bad and you overreacted”.
Yeah, exactly, our healthcare system will be overhelmed pretty quickly if cases will start to pile up.
our healthcare system will be overhelmed pretty quickly if cases will start to pile up
I think that’s the strategy with our own governmental response; to slow it down (they’ve accepted they can’t stop it coming to Ireland as it’s already here); I’ve read something along the lines of “make it so that we get 200 cases over 5 weeks rather than 500 cases over 2 weeks so that hospitals have a chance to respond” and our health minister is talking about “flattening the curve”.
So all the closures, isolation, social distancing and so forth are to slow down the transmission so that only genuine and severe cases turn up to hospital, not everyone getting a cough and fever and panicking and turning up to swamp the place.
Is preventing overload even possible?
Assuming containment fails in the US and the disease runs to 60% herd immunity; that’s about 200m total disease courses. 10% of the currently sick are Serious or worse (ie they need at least Oxygen). About 1/3 of those or 3% of the total sick need ventilation. I haven’t found how long they need ventilation for (on average)— a WAG is 10 days.
That’s 6 million cases requiring 60m ventilator days. I haven’t found how many ventilators we have, but we have 0.1m ICU beds. 20-40% of ICU patients are typically on ventilation and ICU occupancy is about 2/3, but let’s say we have one ventilator per ICU bed.
In order not to have a country-wide shortage of ventilators, we’d have to stretch this out over 600 days. Assuming we could free up the 10 thousand odd ventilators currently used for non-Covid cases.
2 months? That’s almost 2 years.
On the plus side, we have time to make more ventilators.
China and Korea seem to have managed it (also Japan, Taiwan, Singapore) so it’s possible in principle. Whether it’s possible in the US remains to be seen.
I think the drastic measures in Europe will bring down infection rates a lot, but who knows how long they can keep it up. One month is probably not enough…
It should be possible to get more ventilators if the crisis continues, but the lack of trained personnel might become an issue.
By all accounts, we’re likely to have a vaccine in 18 months.
> need ventilation
I’m not in a position to comment on your estimate. But I would note that there are ways to provide ventilation *other* than with an external mechanical ventilator. I’m preparing for the likelihood that I’ll volunteer to go in and work multi-hour rotations using a BVM (Bag valve mask) on someone. It’s a super-inefficient use of human capital, but it’s a potential short-term emergency while other resources come online.
Those policies are partially a reaction on testing being so far grossly insuficient. Although it might not be as bad as in the US. Yesterday Ministry of Health reported 1400 tests, with about 100 confirmed cases. Government promises that it will ramp up testing quickly, but who knows whether we could manage it. It is imho obvious that we have at least hundreds of undetected cases.
So far only (possibly) effective tool we have is a giant hammer. Fortunately government is not afraid to use it, to my pleasant surprise.
One of the most difficult things to grasp intuitively about exponential growth is that comparing numbers is meaningless. Any possible difference is less than a month away. Most are just 1-2 weeks.
The applicable logic is: can we get an epidemic in our country? If yes, sooner and harder you act, better results you get.
Romania for example is about 2 weeks behind Italy (under 100 cases). So far it looks like we’re doing the right things, amazingly, and people are panicked enough to actually avoid socialization. I don’t think it’s just my bubble either, Bucharest hasn’t had such clean air in at least two years. So I’m betting we’re gonna be more or less ok.
Or the infection has not been equal in its spread to/within Czechia and the US? Like, you wouldn’t extrapolate what the US should be doing from what China is doing because China definitely has a ton more infected people, it’s not implausible that Czechia also has a higher rate of infections than the US.
Given the CDC “we forbid you to test” situation, Czechia probably though not necessarily has more complete information than the US does.
It has 0 deaths vs. 38 US deaths with ~30.7 times the population.
Working with that limited information, it seems very improbable that they have a higher rate of infections than the US. That’s not the pattern of exponential growth during the “asymptomatic carriers spread it” phase that grows into symptomatic people >1% of whom die we’ve seen unfold in China, Italy, etc.
Even if Czechia had 1 death, that would be weak evidence that the US rate of symptomatic infections is >1.24X higher per capita: so 0 makes the true US situation worse by an opaque amount. It would be pretty weird if they’re in a worse situation in terms of true, total infections than we are.
Infection rate probably correlates with population density. And while New York City and San Francisco may have the population density of Prague, I’d bet much more of the Czech population lives in population densities higher than, say, Sacramento or Atlanta.
Cool, I see that some volunteers overnight cobbled up a web with good informations about our situation overnight and yesterday they managed to get it connected and approved with health authorities.
“Suprisingly” it is in Czech, but it pretty intuitive – on a first, large graph, blue line represents number of tests, and red bars represent confirmed cases. Testing was evidently ramped up quickly in a last two days.
It has been fairly well established that what “we” can do basically boils down to social distancing, washing our hands, not touching our faces, and trying to build a month or two supply of essentials.
Presumably, the government and private sector are moving as fast as possible to manufacture and distribute diagnostic tests at scale (though I have not heard anything significant about screening tests).
Pretty clearly, leaders of organizations are at least actively thinking about canceling events and gatherings. Towns may elect not to cancel school, but it’s at least no one is ignoring or missing the possibility.
What about hospital capacity? I understand we can’t just conjure 10x the ECMO capacity out of thin air… but presumably hospitalization short of intensive care can make a significant difference for many, many people. What is the art of the possible here in one week? Two weeks? One month? Why aren’t there field hospitals going up in every major city, or at least preparations for such? Why are we hearing nothing about this from our (US) government?
We’ve been hearing that the CDC is moving as slow as possible on rolling out tests at scale. Not sure what the current state of lower-level governments and the private sector being allowed to move as fast as possible is.
I’m hoping that at some point, some sort of large entity (either private sector or state/local government) will use this opportunity to call the feds’ bluff.
What would happen if Johnson and Johnson came out and gave a press conference and said “We have developed a test. We’ve tested it thoroughly and are confident that it is 99% accurate. We are hereby offering it, at cost, to any public or private entity who wants it. It is not approved or endorsed by the CDC, FDA, or anyone else. We don’t care. We can’t wait for them. If they want to stop us from distributing this, they’ll have to throw us all in jail.”
The government has backed down from over-regulation before when the stakes were a lot less than this. Uber operated in defiance of the law in plenty of markets, and got away with it because they were too popular – any city official that tried to throw the book at them risked being voted out of office.
I heard something about the Gates foundation planning to do something like this for Seattle, but that was, like, a week ago. Haven’t heard anything since.
Maybe I am misusing my Bayesian statistics, but I think mass testing is not a great idea, at least at this stage.
Let’s say you have the 99% accurate test you are saying, so that it gives a false positive 1% of the time. There are currently a couple thousand confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., about 1 per 100,000 population. Let’s assume that it is actually 100 times more prevalent than that with undiscovered low-intensity cases, so actually it’s 1 per 1,000. If you test 1,000 people with your 99% accurate test, it will produce 10 false positives mixed in with the true positive. So if I test positive, assuming no other information, I should estimate there is about a 10% chance I actually have the disease. Right?
Of course, you can mitigate this by having independent lines of evidence, but even that becomes more difficult if you start testing at mass scale. If you test 100 million people and have to wade through 1 million false positives, you’ll need a couple other statistically-independent tests at 99% just to get to a manageable number.
I think it would be a really good idea if we had the capability (and I think we would already have the technical capability if we had the social capability).
First of all, if you could identify people with a 10% chance of having the disease, interventions (social distancing, etc) concentrated on them and people close to them would be orders of magnitude more cost effective than those spread across the whole population of infected and noninfected people. You could also be ready to give them chloroquine or remdesivir or whatever at the first sign of fever and cough.
Secondly, I think “false positives” for RT-PCR tests almost all boil down to sample contamination or something in the prime/probe sequences that isn’t actually unique to the target virus. In the latter case you could start sequencing them and updating the tests until they are basically perfect in that respect. In the former case you can repeat tests. It should be possible with a modest overhead to make the actual error rate really small. It isn’t like tests where the thing measured by the test just has a modest correlation with the thing you actually care about.
Thirdly, even if the information was useless as to individuals, having better estimates of how many people are infected in what places would make for drastically better decision making and modeling. Right now everyone is flying blind with a 2 week delay and a large unknown factor between our measurements and the actual number of infections.
The value of large-scale testing is that it lets you do contact tracing. If you do contact tracing on everyone who is identified as carrying COVID-19, you have to do roughly Dunbar’s number of tests per patient, which would have meant roughly 10,000 tests two weeks ago and 200,000 tests now. That gives you ~2 new real cases and, if the test is only 99% accurate, ~2 false positives. Even soft quarantine of those, should drop R0 well below 1.0 and put us on the path to victory.
Those numbers should be something we can deal with. Not being able to do that because the CDC can’t make the test kits and won’t let anyone else make the test kits, is disgraceful.
You might also want to do regular testing of everyone doing direct patient care in a hospital in a community with local transmission. Again, not an intractable number of tests, and if a 1% false-positive rate means you mistakenly send 1% of your nurses home for the duration, that’s probably a fair trade for largely eliminating that transmission vector.
I guess it depends on how accurate you can make the test. I don’t have any technical expertise in the matter; I was just using the number hypothesized above. If you’re talking about rolling out mass tests, like tens or hundreds of millions, then even a 1% rate is going to leave you a big burden of millions of positives to sort through (and if we’re talking about burdening just one population segment, how about retirees stay home?) If you can whittle that down with one-in-a-million level testing, you can presumably do better, and I don’t know anything about the details of that. But I also think that the odds of having the disease right now are probably nowhere near 1 in 1,000. It only arrived at most maybe 6-8 weeks ago. If it doubles once per week, it would only be a few hundred times more infected times it progenitors. It would have to double every 3 days, about, to get to several hundred thousand infected by now. That’s possible, but doesn’t seem consistent with the growth rate others have seen.
@John Schilling:
Of course I have nothing against targeted testing. They should be testing nursing home employees all the time, for example. I’m just saying that testing anything within an order of magnitude of the whole population seems like it’s going to generate more headache and panicked citizens clamoring for a hospital bed because of their “positive test” than it will save.
On a numbers point, if you test 200,000 people with your 99% accurate test, won’t you end up with 2,000 false positives? Am I doing the numbers totally wrong?
Yeah, in that hypothetical you’d get about 4,000 people who are told “As best we can tell, between this quick and dirty test and your having had some contact with a carrier, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’re carrying COVID-19. For the love of God, stay home for the next two weeks and take these precations…”, and half of those will be false positives.
Even if we don’t back up the love-of-God bit with fear of the local sheriff, that’s still a big win over the virus for a tolerably small cost. And even as a Libertarian, I’m OK with bringing in the sheriff for an honest Bayesian 50% probability of someone spreading a deadly disease, if that’s what it takes. But Americans are mostly decent people, so it probably doesn’t need to go that far.
I saw someone propose an idea when tests are limited: testing people in groups.
Let’s say you swabbed all 4 people in my house, and ran them together in one test. If it comes back positive, we are all going into quarantine, which is the same thing that we would do if we knew which one of us specifically tested positive. The rest of us are likely exposed anyway.
I would certainly like to follow-up with knowing which of us is sick, but I’m not sure how important it would be to know that before symptoms: we aren’t supposed to rush into the ER anyway. (No one in my house is immunocompromised.)
Does this make sense? Can we run multiple swabs through the machine at once?
Just have everyone share the same swab, that way you don’t have to worry about testing again to figure out who had it!
Regarding combining group samples into one test I think you run into dilution problems. This would increase the limit of detection and you might end up with false negatives.
I actually think that might be a really good publicity stunt right now, assuming they can get a test that really is 99% correct.
What’s the accuracy on the tests other countries have rolled out in very short amounts of time?
The discovery of the Washington index case was apparently due to a university researcher testing without permission. She was then ordered to stop testing. (the argument in this case being that the people who provided the samples she is testing only agreed to have them tested for influenza, not nCov. I’m like the world’s biggest advocate for being careful about patient consent and even I think this is criminally stupid)
Lab Corp [1] and Quest [2] have both announced private tests that they have validated themselves, relying on the FDA’s sort-of-promise [3] to give labs 15 days after they create their own tests to submit EUA requests to the FDA. This document is a masterpiece of bureaucratic weaseling (e.g. “This guidance represents the current thinking of the Food and Drug Administration on this topic.It does not establish any rights for any person and is not binding on FDA or the public.”) but does more or less appear to let private labs develop their own tests. What it does not do is let commercial suppliers produce their own kits at scale; each individual laboratory has to do this themselves. (e.g. Quest has just a single lab in California doing this). So it’s not clear if private labs are actually adding much capacity yet.
Apparently there is also a looming shortage of the specific sample collection and RNA isolation kit that the CDC specified for use with their test kits. Not sure how much of this problem is red tape and how much of it is just bad planning and supply chain disruptions.
[1] https://files.labcorp.com/testmenu-d8/sample_reports/139900.pdf
[2] https://www.questdiagnostics.com/dms/Documents/covid-19/SARSCoV-2_HCP_Fact_Sheet.pdf
[3] https://www.fda.gov/media/135659/download
My main point here isn’t really about testing specifically. It’s more of a philosophical objection to the notion of “Well the real problem here is the government isn’t letting people do X”
Look, I hate the government as much as anybody. I routinely encourage people to defy it, even on minor things, as a matter of course.
But at this point, not only is it permissible to defy the government, it is morally required. If you truly believe that tens of thousands of lives are at stake, and that you can do something to help, you need to do the thing and help. I will not accept “but the FDA said we couldn’t” as an excuse.
Any company/lower government/individual that can help needs to do so. Better to ask forgiveness than permission. If you let people die because you’re afraid of the FDA, you are no better than the people in the milgram experiment or the people who didn’t call the cops when they heard the girl being raped outside. I know this sounds harsh and cruel but I think this is important. Speaking for myself, I publicly vow that if called to serve on a jury involving a case like this, I promise I will vote you innocent, no matter what.
Live by the bureaucracy. Die by the bureaucracy. Let the world burn!
They have. The government shut them down — no votes needed, it’s the bureaucracy doing it.
“Our team is productively collaborating with state regulators and has identified a path forward that will allow us to continue testing” is euphemistic. It’s a case of, as Scott put it in the coronavirus post, “ban by default, review at leisure”.
How?
Did men with guns literally show up and padlock the door?
If not, they should keep going.
I suspect if they continue in direct defiance of the government, it will become difficult for them to continue operating their research lab in the future, one way or another. It’s possible that the value of their potential future research outweighs the benefit of continuing to test marginally more people, even before you account for the selfish “I don’t want to lose my job and hamstring my career” bias.
To be clear, my stance here is not just that you have a moral duty to save lives, even if the government will punish you for it.
Rather, it’s that in cases this severe, the government is bluffing, and won’t actually punish them for it. In the long run, people who play a part in curing or limiting the spread of this virus will be regarded by the public as heroes, while people who attempt to thwart them will be regarded as villains.
> Did men with guns literally show up and padlock the door?
The regulatory state has gotten around that need. Much like the IRS. It used to be that you had to send them a check for all of your income tax come April. Then they worked around that by implementing “withholding” so that they get most of the money even if you try to avoid paying. And then for the remainder they can just go and pull it from your bank account or wherever you have assets stored. It’s very, very difficult for most employees to be able to long-term keep money from the IRS if it is convinced you owe it.
The same goes for a lot of stuff here. Become ineligible for grants, publication, potentially employment, whatever. The researcher might never be criminally punished and still legally be able to work as a researcher, but (perhaps) not on any government-funded project. Given how the government has a near monopsony on funding this kind of research, it’s in-practice the threat of career destruction.
Right, the government absolutely is not bluffing. They may not criminally prosecute or take any formal action… but any defiant researchers will find themselves quietly blacklisted in the future, and they all know it.
What’s the point of even being a researcher if during a global pandemic you pack your shit and go home because some bureaucrat threatens to take your funding away? What did you get into science and medicine for if not for this?
I am being quite serious here. This is the time. This is the moment. This is when we really need researchers. If you have to sacrifice your career, sacrifice your career. If that happens, make loud and public appeals describing what happened. The public will rally to your cause. Even if they don’t, you’ll have saved thousands, perhaps more.
The choice is whether to end your career to defy your masters and maybe make some small difference, or to suck it up and keep doing your regular work for the rest of your life. It’s an easy choice, really. Particularly given that if they HAD been defiant, most people with a position on their blacklisting would fall somewhere in the spectrum from “well, they should have known” to “gee, that’s too bad, but there’s nothing I can do for them”
The public is fickle and will lose interest once the crisis has past. The bureaucracy, though, holds grudges.
> What’s the point of even being a researcher
A 30+ year career which is interesting, pays well and has decent status.
All of which could be flushed down the toilet by breaking the rules.
I have to agree with Matt M here. A friend of mine gave up his career in research by being a whistleblower: he was a researcher at Harvard, at the start of his career, doing research on music therapy for autism. His bosses were fudging data to make it look like the therapy was working, and he gave up his career exposing them for it. He was immediately ostracized by all his coworkers and never worked in psych research again. (he was a really genial guy, not someone who would rub people the wrong way or anything).
That was a difficult choice for him, but it didn’t involve anything life or death, let alone the lives of potentially thousands of people. He got another career, it isn’t that hard.
And Jack Ma comes to the rescue. The legality of the tests isn’t mentioned, but presumably he doesn’t much care, being insanely rich and outside the US.
I’m not a doctor, but the WHO documents seem to indicate that the main treatments are supplemental oxygen, ventilation, and perhaps ECMO, with ventilation the most proven effective option. So field hospitals are not particularly useful unless they also come with hardware that likely has a long production lead time, probably dependent on supply chains that run through China.
Hospital beds themselves may not be very useful, except as quarantine / holding places.
How complicated would it be to rig up a rough-and-ready oxygen tent? Oxygen bars were briefly trendy in the late 90s/early 2000s (and apparently still exist, although I haven’t seen one in awhile), so I assume consumer-grade oxygen handling equipment exists.
Not a docotor, but from what I understand non-invasive ventilation is not enough for the hard cases. You ideally want to be able to intubate people who have respiratory arrest.
Oxygen tents might be a stop gap measure for worse end of the medium cases. But high oxygen environments are dangerous in them self, and maybe not a good idea.
I’m speculating, but I’d guess an oxygen tent is strictly less effective than supplemental oxygen (i.e. a cannula or mask fed with oxygen-rich gas). And supplemental oxygen is not sufficient for the most severe cases. It is at best a stopgap if you lack invasive ventilation capacity.
Straight-up standard external oxygen administration and monitoring is trivial. As a first approximation, every hospital bed in the country is set up with plumbed-in oxygen. Using a nasal cannula for oxygen administration is routine and we have lots of nasal cannulas – they’re disposable and get bought in bulk. Though that’s true of toilet paper, so … assumptions.
External ventilators and ECMO circuits are going to be the limiting factor. Also, you can fake a mechanical ventilator by using lots of people in shifts. But you can’t replace ECMO with a person – you need the actual equipment. And I have no idea how much of that equipment hospitals have overall. Ventilators (especially lower-capability ones) are all over the place if we do enough scrounging. ECMO is, from what I can tell, pretty rare. It’s used in certain surgeries frequently, and very occasionally in the ICU, but there aren’t large numbers of spare equipment like that floating around that I’m aware of.
FYI, perhaps only tangentially related to this, but I am super disappointed by the guest post Scott Aaronson chose to promote on his blog. Excerpt: “We are watching a once-in-a-century event unfold. Coronavirus–its mutations, its spawn–will change the course of human history. It will overwhelm our defense system and may kill millions. It may continue to mutate and kill millions more.”
This is useful how, exactly?
he posts personal want ads on his blog, so i don’t think being useful is a criteria he uses.
What is the term for the human habit/reaction to prime yourself for the worst possible outcome when presented with an unknown? I know it’s a “thing” in evolutionary psych.
The starting point in that discussion is 250k deaths in the US alone.
Surefire ways to avoid Coronavirus!
–Dunk your head in a bucket of supersaturated vitamin C solution three times. Remove it twice.
–Don’t take any wooden nickels. However, ingesting one real penny every ten minutes will provide more than adequate levels of zinc.
–Teach friends and family the art of Japanese Reverse Coughing, wherein an incipient cough is arrested in the trachea, rerouted down the pharynx, and emerges via peristalsis as an antiseptic fart.
Hey, just a few more of these and we can submit something to McSweeney’s under Scott Alexander’s name!
Harness the antiseptic properties of copper by bronzing your mucus membranes.
Avoid the bloody riots over toilet paper shortages by installing a bidet.
(Only half joking).
Excellent idea.
(Not joking at all).
It’s a well know fact that bioavailability is higher in rectally administered medicines, versus orally. Which is why, in my household, we’re applying our hand sanitizer via butt-chug.
…thus also solving the toilet paper shortage….
Social distancing is clearly going to be vital here, so we’re going to need solitary alternatives to traditional social activities. Therefore…
Reality wins. I got nothing on this.
Maybe we should be worrying about a paper towel shortage as well…
Gargle every 30 minutes for 3 minutes with a soap solution.
The situation is developing rapidly, so be sure to attend your daily meeting on social distancing measures.
You joke but this did literally happen to me yesterday. Boss asked me to host a meeting on coronavirus safety. He sat right next to me (it was a large room, plenty of other spaces were available).
I tried not to glare at him when I went over how a six-foot distance is recommended.
Did you submit the story to Scott Adams? (It might be too real to be funny).
Avoid touching your Facebook.
But you can just keep Tumblrin’ down, as long as you stay six feet away from the dash.
Make sure to stock up on a month’s worth of Grams. Hurry, with panic buying they’re sure to be gone in a Snap, and the time is TikTokin’ down!
In the event of a power outage, submit your location to Wattpad.
You Twitt! That’s awful advice!
Remote access to your work computer from your home computer which you are accessing remotely from your underground bunker.
Keep 1 meter distances from all humans. Including yourself (presumably)
Increase your chance at having access to a nearby hospital by turning your home into one.
Eat large amount of salmon and salmon eggs and hibernate for a few months.
Parents are facing increasing difficulty as a result of widespread school closings, and the consequent need to ensure their children are supervised.
However, it’s important to note that airfares are lower than ever.
Parents can take advantage of this by booking their kids on round-trip flights during the day.
My comments have intermittently not been showing up on ssc, I do not believe I have been banned, since it has been happening for multiple accounts on multiple devices (this account sometimes works and sometimes does not). Any advice on how to get tech help?
Are you including links? Sometimes links (or too many links) can trigger the filter, although I’ve never seen any explanation for exactly what links will do so. Alternatively, you might be using a filtered word (check out the comments page and scroll down to “Censored Words”, and note that the list of examples is not all inclusive).
i dont believe i have used any banned words. the filter also seems to be on or off for blocks of time, and not on a per comment basis
The SSC diplomacy game is probably looking for a replacement France (they don’t seem to be messaging anyone so I’m assuming they’ve dropped out). If you’re interested in joining, click here if you want to play by yourself (only for people who’ve played before) or comment below if you’d like to join as part of a team. Once I’ve confirmed they’ve dropped out I’ll put someone/a team in to replace them. The game hasn’t started yet (still in Spring 1901) so you shouldn’t be at a significant disadvantage.
Update: France have been confirmed as not dead, ignore the above.
Oh good. I’ve been worried since learning how bad things are next door in Lombardy.
Maybe we play on a variant map where Piedmont is the no-entry province but Switzerland is traversable?
I am still potentially interested in playing as part of a team.
Start tolling the plague bells, the schools are closing over here! The big Dublin St Patrick’s Day parade was cancelled only recently, following most towns and cities around the county cancelling theirs, but the schools weren’t supposed to close (the irony in this article is thick: “no, it’s only rumours and misinformation that the schools will close Friday, ignore it – Dept. of Education”. Today – “schools will close Friday”).
Okay, at around 11:30 a.m. local time we got the news to close our service from 6 p.m. this evening for the next two weeks (so, if we don’t all keel over and die, we’ll re-open on 30th March).
News was announced by our Taoiseach who, conveniently, is in America at the moment. All schools, colleges and childcare services, as well as cultural institutions, are to close. Restaurants and pubs can stay open, but should encourage “social distancing”.
The government (we don’t have a new one yet, so the old one is in place until we do) are taking a level-headed approach to this, and admitting that yeah, there will be deaths (the first death happened yesterday, an elderly woman with underlying health conditions who seems to have been a case of community transmission):
So, I’m off work for the next fortnight. We’ve had two confirmed cases of Covid-19 in my county (it was only a matter of time until it spread here from Cork) and mostly I’m watching the news to see who’s going to be next. Already, by 12 noon, I was hearing reports that everyone was queuing up to buy the shelves bare in the shops in town. Glad I did my weekly shopping early this week!
If you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know what happened! 😉
Meanwhile, despite having an order of magnitude more cases, the Dutch government just decided to keep all the schools open (though everybody is strongly recommended to work from home wherever possible and to cancel events with over 100 people).
Schools and universities closed in Poland as well, for two weeks. I think people are way too worried about this thing.
@Deiseach says:
A few that had sick students already were (no one said so, but knowing which schools had been closed they were one with many Chinese surnames students), but come Monday all of San Francisco’s public schools will be closed (“public” as in “state”, not ‘public’ as in how the island next door to yours uses the term), the Archdiocese of San Francisco yesterday closed all 90 of its schools in San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties after a student tested positive for the virus.
Our St. Paddy’s Day parade (which has long substituted for our Labor Day parade and was kinda a big deal for building trades unions here) is cancelled as well, as are many other events.
Selfishly, I’m hoping major league baseball games are also cancelled because that means a shorter commute for me, and on that note: I’ve read reports of “San Francisco seems like a ghost town with so many now telecommuting”, but the roads sure still seem full to me, but I understand that folks are abandoning BART (our local subway) and busses.
The report from Manhattan: I normally walk to work, and I guess I still do now that the office is closed and everyone’s working from home. Just, uh, walking a couple of feet to my desk instead of a couple of blocks to my office.
I took the subway the other day, and it was surprisingly pleasant – the train was at about half capacity and smelled of disinfectant. I guess now we know what it takes to get the MTA to start cleaning the subway.
I took Bart on Wednesday, and I was able to get a seat at 5:00pm. I was pretty shocked . I had heard 15-30% drop in ridership, but it seemed more like 75% off what I normally would see at that time, which is literally shoving your way on.
Anyone know the average investment portfolio of baby boomers prior to the current activity?
My gut instinct is that this is going to trigger a long term shift into less risky investments by that generation, which could have longer term impacts on the stock market. It wouldn’t surprise me if, adjusting for any inflation in the meantime, it is a decade before the stock market “recovers” from this crash. (Also it might be tomorrow. Don’t take this as investment advice, just a personal expectation.)
I’ve been expecting 10+ year recovery time for over a week now*.
*I am not an expert.
Going by standard advice, Boomers, being close to retirement or recently past it, should have shifted to low risk options, right?
My anecdotal evidence suggests they didn’t, but it is biased by the samples in question.
Yes, most boomers are invested more heavily in equities and high (relative) yield stock-based investments because they can’t get yield anywhere else. Let me assure you that Joe and Mary Smith, age 70, would much prefer to be in a Municipal or Corporate bond ladder pulling 5-6%, rather than hunting for overpriced low-volatility dividend paying stocks. The issue is that most retirees need a 5-6% return in order to meet their spending needs, because they haven’t saved enough. If they can’t get that return via more conservative investments, they’re forced to take more investment risk in order to meet their return requirements.
The investment industry has been aware of this since ~2011 or so. Hence the creation of equity indexed annuities and similar products for middle-income or upper-middle investors. Higher net worth investors are inundated with marketing “Alts,” or alternatives that supposedly track contra or decoupled from the equity markets.
Fyi, Czech government just ordered closing of all pubs in the country from 20 to 6 every night. If you know anything about Czechia, you know that this is very serious step.
It must be serious, our lot may have cancelled the Paddy’s Day bash but they’re letting the pubs stay open!
Stay strong (and sober), brother!
Judging by the statistics, you really are not much better off than us.
You probably do not have so many people coming from Italy – there were thousands of Czech tourists there days ago, and of those few of them who were tested, many came positive. Also we have a shortage of medical personell, tests and protective equipment.
But regardless, if I would be Irish, I would probably write to my parliament representative to demand closing of everything nonessential.
They cancelled the Six Nations rugby match, but.
But.
Never mind letting the pubs stay open, they let Cheltenham go ahead. Well, most of that is on the UK not cancelling it, but I can understand why with the likely enormous economic losses that would entail.
But.
There has been at least one confirmed case of COVID-19 in Cheltenham. Thousands of Irish have travelled over to the festival where it’s expected around 60,000 people will attend over the four days.
So the racing bosses said “No problem, go ahead”, the British government don’t seem to have said a single word one way or the other, and our own lot were gearing up to head off for (reduced) Paddy’s Day junkets abroad.
If X hundred people return home and come down with community-transmitted infections from the racing, it’ll be too late to bolt the stable door. But who knows? Maybe there will be nothing from it!
Flippantly, cancelling Cheltenham would be a really bad idea: rioting Irishmen, a virtual state of war across the UK’s only land border, the added drinking pressure on the Birmingham St Patrick’s day parade (also not cancelled- there’s a pattern here…).
Seriously, why would the UK, which hasn’t yet called for closures (either in a bid to reach the Easter holidays, or because they are looking to lower the curve of infection not postpone a high peak), cancel Cheltenham? Ireland is behind the UK on the curve so having loads of Iris come here is low risk for the UK. And there’s a traditional view of decisions affecting Ireland negatively in politics here…
Keeping the pubs open because alcohol is a disinfectant?
Apparently, the S&P 500 has hit circuit breakers to temporarily limit trading three times this week, including twice just this morning. Has that ever happened before?
If it hits one more time trading is done for the day…
I was told when it hit the circuit breaker the first time this week, it never happened before under the current regulation (which admittelty only is in effect since 2013) and was only done once in 1997.
I should have sold my stock positions back in late Feburary.
The circuit breakers have only existed since 1987, so that’s only 4 bear markets before this one (if you count Dec. 2018).
Only twice – once on Monday and once today. Both cases were just minutes after the open and expected given drops in foreign and futures trading, which is not really what the circuit breakers are meant for. They’re more for sudden intraday drops, possibly due to trading errors, but the regulation as written says “down 7% from yesterday’s close? 15-minute halt” no matter when or why the 7% drop occurs (other than the last 25 minutes of the day when the rule is suspended).
I was confused by the distinction between futures and actual stock market circuit breakers. Apparently pre market futures trading hit the circuit breakers on Monday, Thursday, and Friday, while the actual market hit the circuit breakers on Monday and Thursday.
Is this whole Coronavirus panic some kind of liability cascade?
Harvard suspends classes, generating headlines and setting the nationwide standard. Other major universities follow suit, all around the country. At the few college/universities that are still open, this discussion transpires:
Administrator A: “It seems unreasonable to suspend classes. This disease doesn’t even largely affect college-age kids.”
Administrator B: “Well, what if a kid does happen to get sick and die? We’d be wide open to a lawsuit. We need to preserve our endowment. Better to suspend classes and be safe.”
Now imagine this discussion multiplied 100,000 times, at every school, business, institution, etc. across the country.
Might one solution be to legislate against Coronavirus-related lawsuits? Can that even be constitutionally done?
(Just to clarify, I do believe the flattening-the-curve argument, but I don’t understand all the actions targeting younger people when it’s clearly much older people who are at risk.)
Two reasons: first, all those young people meet elders. So having 50% of population infected, even if it’s mostly young ones, makes a lot harder from elders to stay healthy than if it’s just 5% infected.
Second, number of available beds in intensive care is astonishingly small. We’re not talking literal beds, we’re talking a bunch of machines that have (real) costs of thousands of usd PER DAY. So even if the young ones have complication rates of 1% (conservative estimate, if death rates are 0.2%), this still makes for simultaneous cases that are probably one or two orders of magnitude over the available “beds”.
Also ICU beds have strong oportunity cost of the “we could not put this stroke/accident/assault/flu victim in an ICU bed because none were available.” and “we are down 2 doctors and 8 nurses, because some got infected, and the others had to work 3 shifts straight and are now on the brink of collapse” kind.
This happened in Wuhan and is happening in Lombardy.
Harvard also has professors and other older people running around.
Besides, it would be a PR disaster just to become a COVID hot spot, even if no ones dies.
I don’t think you can legislate against this. Regardless of lawsuits, no administrator wants to be dragged in the media because they didn’t follow “better safe than sorry” even if that leads to dumb results.
(Background:
1. I think a lot of reactions are appropriate to stop the US from turning into Italy.
2. But “better safe than sorry” can lead to making things much worse for everyone.
3. But college kids are right at the age where their risk-accepting parts of their brains have been set to “STUPID”, and they are very mobile and travel around the country, so they are possibly even worse super-vectors than elementary school kids.)
Are college students more likely to travel and make stupid decisions while engaged in structured/scheduled in person classes or when they are basically given a semester off?
Good point!
It is a good argument. If they are being sent home to their parents, presumably mom and dad aren’t going to be willing to pay for Johnny to go to Italy to get a virus that will kill them, though.
Also, then you push responsibility off to the parents.
Sure, but Johnny wasn’t going to Italy in the middle of sprint semester anyway. He might decide, now that he has all this free time, to go visit his friend in [distant city] and bring the virus with him if he is already carrying or pick it up and bring it home if anyone is infected there/along the way.
College is a more effective quasi-quarantine than being at home doing whatever.
Maybe. Although if he’s at home, mom and dad might not let him take the car.
On the other hand, living in dorms, one student per room, with professional cleaning staff disinfecting the common bathrooms and kitchens twice a day could be a really good solution for containment.
I think you are drastically overestimating the amount of control parents can exert over most 18-22 year olds. Probably even the amount of control most parents want or attempt to exert.
And for the parents that do have full control of their kids actions (ha), it still requires that the parents place the importance of limiting viral spread high enough for them to decide not to let their kid leave the house.
it still requires that the parents place the importance of limiting viral spread high enough for them to decide not to let their kid leave the house.
And for the parents to decide that limiting their chances of catching the virus doesn’t involve telling their kid to stay away from the house
The big danger is lectures, which are often 100’s of people in a room, and in lecture halls that are used intensively, such that the same seat could be occupied by 5-10 people over a couple days. The most common response so far is cancelling lectures; kicking people out of student housing seems only a logical outcome of no longer having any event on campus.
Not so much the young people being at risk, more Young Tom gets it, gets a mild case, gets better. However, before he was diagnosed as having it, he was in contact with Grandad Bert and Granny Lucy and old Mrs Smith and …. then somebody gets it via community-transmitted infection, and if they’re Old Mr or Mrs Smith with high blood pressure or a bad heart or diabetes, they are much more likely to die.
Especially if Young Tom is not 20 but 4 years old. Kids that age are constantly getting sick and passing it on to other kids, parents, their families, childcare workers and teachers, etc. etc. etc. This is bad enough if it’s colds and flu, or the odd time they may have been exposed to someone with chickenpox etc. Just imagine if it’s coronavirus. 4 year old Tom may be okay, but Grandad Mike isn[t likely to get off so lightly.
It makes more sense for K-12 students who come home every day. It makes less sense for college students who live at school, and are arguably better quarantined/separated from the vulnerable living in dorms on campus than living at home*.
*There is the issue of older teachers and support staff, of course.
Without commenting on the merits of closing/canceling things in general, NCAA basketball conferences just canceled all the major conference tournaments. The Big East canceled their tournament at halftime of the first game, which is obviously 100% about optics rather than effects because the relevant people where already in the stadium and breathing/sweating on each other for 20 minutes…any damage was already done. Not saying there is no benefit to cancelling the tournaments, but there is pretty clearly no benefit to cancelling an in progress game at halftime.
Right. I wouldn’t say it’s a “liability” cascade so much as it is a “public relations” cascade.
If this gets really bad, to the point where at least, say, 10% of the population becomes infected, it would be very difficult to prove that any individual infected person contracted the virus from any specific other individual at any specific location or event. The risk of a basketball fan successfully suing the NBA, a specific NBA team, or a specific NBA venue is virtually zero.
But once the dominant popular narrative becomes “we can prevent this by shutting down public events” and once governments start officially recommending the shutdown of public events, well, it would take some major cojones by the NBA to just keep on playing games as usual. And if they do that, and if we then do reach the “really bad scenario,” the popular narrative will quickly become “it’s the NBA’s fault we have this pandemic.”
I can’t think of many things that might engender more hatred towards a brand, to the extent that it represents an existential threat to their ongoing business model, than being blamed for exacerbating a global pandemic.
And keep in mind that all of these events are entertainment. Luxuries. Wal-Mart can stay open for a while making a (legitimate) argument of “If we shut down, people might starve.” The NBA can’t do that.
Many US colleges are on spring break, so closing things down for a couple weeks now prevents having students who picked up COVID on their trips from returning to school while infectious but not yet symptomatic.
@Bobobob
Did you make up the term “liability cascade?” DDG doesn’t return anything that looks like it’s a common meme. That term should be added to the glossary and you deserve credit for it.
My kid’s chess tournament tomorrow is canceled/postponed. There’s no reason to do that when the schools are still open, but “abundance of caution” and all that. Liability cascade. That’s a good term.
+1, it’s a good term.
I actually did make that up right out of my head.
Personal finance experts recommend that individuals and families have six (or nine or twelve) months worth of spending in an emergency savings account.
Are there similar guidelines for businesses? There’s talk about how the airlines, cruise industry, resorts, and such are going to need a bailout. Is keeping that much cash on hand unproductive except for the black swan events where you’ll need it or go bust?
IANAE (I am not an economist), but it seems like any business who tries to do that is going to be out competed by one who doesn’t, so the only businesses that could even consider it are businesses that are so entrenched and have such an advantage that they have no concern about competition. Not sure how many businesses that would be, but probably not a lot.
That advice for individuals/families has always seemed a little pie-in-the-sky to me. I’m an individual who makes pretty decent money and I don’t have to support a family. Saving up 6 months worth would probably take me a couple years if I lived extremely frugally.
You want a few months of expenses, not income. If you lost your job and cancelled all non-essential things like cable and gym memberships, what would you need to pay for insurance, housing, food?
Ah, right. Probably around 6 months, maybe a year.
Jobs also tend to have expenses like commuting and less time to cook.
The norm seems to be the opposite: encouraging firms to take on as much debt as they can handle.
This always seemed utterly absurd to me since sure, it boosts returns but it makes the whole thing extra-fragile.
In a competitive market it would need to be regulation across the board to require companies over a certain size to keep money in some kind of emergency escrow fund, (that they aren’t allowed mortgage, borrow against etc) enough to cover emergencies or pay employees back pay and taxes if the firm suddenly went belly up or hit a major emergency.
I’m sure some people would love to suggest insurance… but insurance works poorly against risks that suddenly hit everything at once worldwide because then the insurance fund just goes bust and everyone is fucked. They rely heavily on a limited fraction of policy holders ever claiming all at once.
What you really need for emergencies is stockpiled money and resources, not just risk pooling.
That’s what I’ve heard from corporate higher-ups before: that having a certain amount of debt is more beneficial than being totally in the black, so they do it deliberately.
I remember that back in the accounting class I had in my German vocational school our teacher made an advice about the amount of liquidity that is consindered normal in different industries.
But I don’t remember how much that was.
Liquidity analysis is a core part of evaluating the health of any business. The posters above seem to be working from broad-brush economic first principles, which in this case are highly misleading. I would bet that businesses are in general more liquid and less indebted than households in the US.
There isn’t really a universal rule because of the greater diversity in the types of assets and liabilities that businesses have and because this analysis is a standard part of any creditworthiness determination. Anyone considering investing in or loaning money to a business will do a detailed analysis of liquidity. Businesses will do similar analyses on significant suppliers or customers. I’m not a banker, so I’ll leave discussion of the details to others.
Lots of rules of thumb exist, like the quick ratio. The “healthy zones” differ by industry. It is generally accepted that most businesses should be able to meet the next year of liabilities with liquid assets, though, which accords with the standard household guidance.
Any business that has a credible chance of surviving, can secure commercial credit to cover a short-term cash crunch. There are still legitimate reasons for a business to have a fair degree of cash(*) around, e.g. being a seasonal business that has to make off-season payroll from their seasonal revenue. But for dealing with emergencies, credit works well enough.
And, “what if the emergency includes a banking system failure so we can’t get credit”, usually gets the proper rebuttal that in that case your suppliers are shut down and your customers are broke so your vault-o-cash is just a consolation prize rather than the salvation of your business.
* In the broadest sense of the term; almost never literal banknotes
Businesses make a difference between “cash on hand”, “liquid assets”, and “marketable assets”, which very few households have enough assets to worry about.
Cash on hand is managed very tightly, because a shortage is only a problem if there are banking-system issues. “Liquid assets” (T-Bills, commercial paper, etc) are where most “we might need this next weke” assets are kept. But for paying employees if something goes wrong, “marketable assets” are fine – investment grade bonds are a very common investment in this category.
I thought “cash on hand” and “liquid assets” were usually lumped together as “cash and cash equivalents”, with the defining feature of the latter being that due to a combination of very close maturity date and very low default risk, cash equivalents almost always trade within a few percent of face value. As the name implies, there’s little practical difference for a business between “cash” in the form of checking or money market deposits vs “cash equivalents” in the form of T-Bills or commercial paper.
On the other hand, the “cash and cash equivalents” category might be specific to Financial Accounting. If you’re talking in a Managerial Accounting context, I’m less confident that they get lumped together in a single category.
For measures of financial stability, you are correct. For a Treasury function, managing to keep most of the “cash and cash equivalents” in cash equivalents is part of their job. And in 2008, it was relevant for a few days, as some cash equivalents were suddenly much less liquid than typical.
I think (and I know less than nothing about economics) the argument there is that having a pile of cash sitting in a bank or wherever doing nothing while waiting for a rainy day is bad for the business, bad for the economy, because that is money that could be put to use (e.g. invested) but instead it’s just sitting there.
So businesses aren’t really encouraged to have piles of cash sitting around doing nothing (unless they’re Apple or Google or the likes who can’t help accumulating Scrooge McDuck vaults of dosh).
Well, for gentrifying areas, small businesses can’t save anything because of rising costs eating any revenue increases.
But they’re also in areas where credit is clearly more easily available…
Yes, and then that doesn’t help when credit is very much less available during disaster periods.
You’re thinking about Optimal Capital Structure.
I can’t sum it up any better than the first paragraph:
“The optimal capital structure of a firm is the best mix of debt and equity financing that maximizes a company’s market value while minimizing its cost of capital. In theory, debt financing offers the lowest cost of capital due to its tax deductibility. However, too much debt increases the financial risk to shareholders and the return on equity that they require. Thus, companies have to find the optimal point at which the marginal benefit of debt equals the marginal cost.”
Thanks, that was really educational!
Individuals are different than business because they want to retire, so naturally should be building up reserves for when they retire and having savings of several months of expenses is a step in that direction. Cyclical business may need savings for downturns. In the long term if a business ages and its products are not longer desired, it just returns what money it can to the owners.
If the businesses are fundamentally sound, somebody will extend them credit. If you have a secure LOC of 6-9 months working capital you probably don’t need that much cash on hand.
So Trump has banned all travel from continental Europe (due to extensive passport data sharing, the UK is not banned).
I know that several people here have said that Trump wasn’t doing enough and was just blustering his way through, but it seemed obvious to me that his tweets were exactly what the CDC experts were telling him translated into Trump-speak.
This shutdown is probably a bit late, like his ban on travel from China, but not terribly late and possibly as early as it could be for political reasons.
Overall, the right call, would’ve been better a week ago, but the administration seems to be doing all that it can.
The problem is nobody knows how to translate trump-speak, so your statement is unfalsifiable, making it somewhat silly to dispute it with you. It seams the translation is ‘whatever he said was perfect, save a few instances that we’ll say were less than perfect as to lend credibility to the scam’.
And what does it matter if the trump-speak was perfect when 55% of Americans, and nearly all of the rest of the world can’t speak this language?
Finally, being ‘a bit late’ for this situation is probably a bit worse than in other situations.
My read is that he and his administration ignored the views of experts for weeks because they were worried about the effect on global markets. Trump publicly downplayed concerns, saying Democrats are politicizing it and that it’s their new “hoax”. His administration has claimed are recently as a week ago that the virus was https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/america-should-stay-at-work-despite-coronavirus-larry-kudlow-says.html. Trump told people last week that, “anyone who wants a test gets a test“.
These time for stern-faced people delivering a clear, consistent message of calm and competence. What we got was self-serving remarks the ranged from misleading to obviously false. Because Trump views any criticism of his administration’s actions as bad-faith partisanship, he interpreted criticisms of his administration’s response to the virus as insincere. He therefore dismissed the criticisms as partisan and responded to them as such. Instead of presenting this as a non-partisan health crisis, it was treated for at least a month like a Dem hit job. And now you’ve got folks like McCarthy calling it the “Chinese coronavirus”, attempting to further politicize it.
There is now (or at least was a week ago) a substantial partisan divide over how concerned folks are about the virus.
And of course the kicker is this administration’s decision in 2018 to dump the individual and team responsible for Federal responses to global pandemics and then not replace them.
Trump cut off travel to China pretty early, so what experts was he ignoring then?
Democrats ARE politicizing it, and he called it a “hoax” to compare it to the attacks from the false Russia story, not that coronavirus was a hoax. In fact he specifically said that he was getting the US prepared and that we would lose people to it in the sentence after that.
Kudlow specifically in your link said the virus was serious and that you should avoid places with outbreaks. He was warning against overreaction where it isn’t spreading.
Yeah, that one is probably implausible.
Probably because the criticism of his administration’s response was insincere. Here is the Democratic governor of California on the response:
https://www.newsweek.com/californias-democrat-governor-praises-trumps-coronavirus-response-every-single-thing-he-said-1491294
It’s a Chinese coronavirus. How is that politicizing it? It’s like saying that calling Ebola Ebola is politicizing it because it points out it was from the Ebola river. Or MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome).
That is indeed true. Probably partially because where people live. Democrats tend to be urban, where they are at much higher risk.
Democrats ARE politicizing it
Some are, yes.
and he called it a “hoax” to
Lemme stop you right there. It is irresponsible to call anything related to this a “hoax” at all. If that means you give up some ammunition against Democrats, too fucking bad.
On February 26, Trump said we had ’15 people, and in a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.’
National Review’s editorial on Tuesday put it well
Asking Trump to stop talking like Trump isn’t going to happen. He communicated accurate information about the outbreak as of that date, including severity.
National Review is right-leaning, but they also hate Trump. I don’t trust their analysis either.
Trump has done literally all of those things. He also punched back at the people making political hay.
He cut all travel to China early, he had the FDA declare it an emergency (that actually hurt because of red tape, but he couldn’t know that), he’s given the same information as the CDC constantly, just in Trumpian terms.
He’s been TRYING to calm fears constantly, but the people who want to make political hay are intentionally arguing against him.
How many are dead? Has the total number deaths in the entire 300m+ country reached a bad summer weekend in Chicago yet?
We’re contemplating shutting down the entire US economy over the deaths of 38 individuals. Now that’s certainly not a good thing, but again…38 people. That’s less than the number of people attached by sharks last year!
Almost 100 million Americans are pre-diabetic. When do we declare that public health crisis?
Asking Trump to stop talking like Trump isn’t going to happen
I don’t care. If Biden likes pushing big red buttons I’m not going to make excuses for him launching nukes.
I approve of Trump’s cutting travel from China. I think it bought us maybe a month, but a month that was wasted dicking around with testing kits and pretending nothing was going to go wrong The Quillette article posted elsewhere shows what Earth-2 Trump could have done and still been Trump: travel restrictions, but also cutting through the stupid red tape and preparing people months ago.
he’s given the same information as the CDC constantly
God damn. Just God damn.
–
March 2, Trump: “So you’re talking over the next few months, you think you could have a vaccine.”
March 2, director of NIAID: “You won’t have a vaccine. You’ll have a vaccine to go into testing. A final vaccine could be ready in a year to a year-and-a-half.”
–
March 5, head of WHO: “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died…By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.”
March 5, Trump: “Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it’s very mild.”
–
March 10, Trump: “A lot of people think [corona] goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in.”
March 12, CDC director of NCIRD: “I’m happy to hope that it goes down as the weather warms up, but I think it’s premature to assume that, and we’re certainly not using that to sit back and expect it to go away.”
–
This one is out of time order, from around February 26 but I saved it for last:
Around February 25, CDC Director NCIRD: “Ultimately, we will see community spread in this country. It’s not a question of if, but rather a question of when and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”
One day later, Trump: “I don’t think it’s inevitable. It probably will. It possibly will. It could be at a very small level or it could be at a larger level. Whatever happens, we’re totally prepared.”
–
So, yeah, “he’s given the same information as the CDC constantly” if you mean that he’s undermined the CDC’s attempts to warn people that community spread was going to happen. Yeah. Great. Sure. Fuck.
@Edward Scizorhands
1: That’s Trump asking a question. Asking questions is what he should do.
2: Trump is saying, ACCURATELY, that it’s not 3.4% of all cases, but 3.4% of identified cases because we know there are other unidentified cases. Probably also using the fact that South Korea, with the most extensive testing, has a death rate under 1%. https://time.com/5798168/coronavirus-mortality-rate/
3: That’s him agreeing with Trump and then saying we need to be prepared in case he’s wrong. So exactly what I’m talking about.
4. That’s Trump agreeing AGAIN: “It probably will but we’re prepared”.
Look, Trump is giving the most positive spin on the issue because he’s Trump and he’s trying to keep people from panicking, but in none of those is Trump lying.
> On February 26, Trump said we had ’15 people, and in a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.’
This absolutely turned out to be wrong. But at that time my understanding is that the CDC and all other public health officials thought that tracking down people using contact tracing plus quarantine of those people would be sufficient to stop any outbreaks. So you’d have a few dozen people symptomatic, a few hundred carriers which were asymptomatic and needed to wait a few weeks, and then it would be over. Not great, but not terrible.
This is used to deal with diseases typically considered to be more severe such as tuberculosis.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the disease was far more contagious than originally suspected and that contact tracing ultimately failed. The science is evolving.
(I make no excuse for Trump’s terrible communication)
On February 26, the United States had fifty-three confirmed COVID-19 cases. I’m pretty sure nobody at CDC, etc, was telling Trump that the number was going to go to zero in “a couple of days”; almost certainly they were telling him that there would be more yet-unconfirmed cases showing up in new testing. But he was well off on the proven facts on the ground as they were known at the time.
Whose analysis do you trust?
1. Conceded.
2. The WHO had earlier given fatality rates of 0.7% to 4%, and readjusted to 2.3% with more information, and readjusted again to 3.4%. That number will undoubtedly change a lot more with more data as time goes forward. When Trump says the head of WHO is giving out, I quote, “a false number,” that is not deferring to the SMEs.
3. Where is the CDC guidance that coronavirus “goes away”? https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/10/donald-trump-optimistic-spring-heat-will-kill-coronavirus/ Who are the SMEs that he is talking about? There is reason to think transmission will slow. But you claimed “he’s given the same information as the CDC constantly” and you sure will not find the CDC saying “a lot of people say coronavirus will go away in April.” He twice said it would go away that day so it wasn’t some stutter.
4. Inevitable means it is going to happen. Saying “It probably will. It possibly will” is saying it is NOT inevitable.
Feb 26: “When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
Feb 26: “We hope it doesn’t spread. There’s a chance that it won’t spread too, and there’s a chance that it will.”
Feb 28: “and we only have 15 people and they are getting better, and hopefully they’re all better.”
None of those are agreeing with “inevitable.”
Ya, the barrage of articles calling anyone who calls it Chinese coronavirus or Wuhan coronavirus racist is only slightly more ridiculous than the weekly facebook posts saying (insert recreational drug here) cures it.
What you want in a crisis like this is for your leader to reassure people. Taking dramatic steps isn’t the same thing as panicking. You want someone to get out in early February, when I was traveling domestically, listening to and reading about this virus and the threat it posed to the US, to clearly and accurately communicate facts to people*. To explain what risks folks face individually and what risks we face as a country. Or point to the expert and shut up.
We didn’t get any of that, and IMO “Well, Trump doesn’t do that sort of thing” is damning not exonerating.
In Trump-speak, everything related to Russia was a total sham. Talking about COVID using the same language and in the same context implies that everything related to COVID is also a total sham. Trump doesn’t want you to believe what Government experts say about Russia or Ukraine because those folks are part of the Deep State. So now anything that sounds different from what Trump has told you about COVID sounds like its coming from the Deep State. When you deliberately erode trust in Government institutions, you don’t get to then say, “Well, he sometimes says things that are incorrect, but those Serious Government Bureaucrats will correct him and it own’t have an effect on the way the public reacts.” Those Serious Government Bureaucrats look just like the ones he’s told you are full of shit and are really Democrats out to get him!
Aside from banning travel to China, the feds have been consistently lagging behind local and state governments, schools, and businesses. This is bad for the nation because it’s the Feds that have sole control over interstate travel. Local communities can contain outbreaks locally, but it’s folks driving and flying from state to state and ensures that this won’t be a localized thing.
*In every conversation I’ve had with people about COVID over the past six weeks, I’ve expressed high levels of uncertainty. There was never clear communication about the virus from our Government. It consistently felt like the Trump administration thought the media was blowing things out of proportion (they are known to do that) and responded by minimizing the potential risk to an absurd degree as an attempt to balance things out or something. The communications strategy felt like a political one rather than a public health one. Experts weren’t trotted out to testify publicly and give briefings to the press. Rather, they were told not to talk to the press. So we were left in this weird spot where it felt like everything was spin and nothing was factual.
This is precisely why it’s important to have an apolitical bureaucracy that you can point to and say, “Don’t believe me, believe these folks.” But when you’ve spent years attacking these folks as political hacks, you lose that, and the result is what we’ve had: Uncertainty, confusion, and toilet paper shortages.
@EchoChaos >
FWIW, this week on the radio I’ve heard our Republican President, Democratic Governor, and Democratic Mayor all speak with one voice about The Grand Princess ship’s landing (which I saw docked on my way home, and my wife saw containment tents for passengers from it at a local hospital yesterday), then I heard Republican Vice-President Pence praise California’s response, then I heard Governor Newsom praise the Federal government’s response, all of which seemed to me to be fine “partisanship ends at the waters edge” stuff, then, immediately after my hearing Pence and Newsom, I heard U.S. Senator Murray light into what she said were inadequate responses of both the Federal and local governments in her own Washington State (presumably mostly Democrats), so she did bipartisan censure!
A lot of events, schools, et cetera in my area are closed, but we haven’t yet had the infection rate that Seattle has had (my wife is a bit afraid for her Mom who lives in Seattle and has near neighbors that sometimes visit family in China).
The problem is that there has been so much bad-faith partisanship barely masquerading as legitimate criticism, it is essentially impossible for me to tell whether or not criticism of the administration’s handling of COVID-19 is legitimate or political maneuvering. The left media was extremely worried about the surveillance state…until the surveillance state went after Trump, and then we have to defer to the wisdom of the patriots in the “Intelligence Community.” Approximately 99.978% of human beings despised brutalist federal buildings until the Trump administration recommended a default of classical architecture for new buildings instead, and now gosh those grotesque concrete blobs are the best things ever. I could list many, many, many more examples.
Now I know something about internets and government surveillance and since I am possessing of eyes I am able to make my own judgements about architecture so I could see that these reactions to Trump’s actions constituted bad-faith partisanship. Unfortunately I don’t know crap about medicine or diseases. I’m vaguely aware that there exists squishy stuff inside of my body, and if that stuff were to come out, I would die or something? That’s about all I know about medicine. So I do not know what the correct course of action for responding to COVID-19 is. I strongly suspect no one else does either because this is a novel, chaotic situation with unknown unknowns. The only pattern I’ve got here to trust is the one that says “it doesn’t matter what Trump does, his political enemies will condemn him.”
Wolf has been cried many, many, god so many times about Trump, and there’s never a wolf. Maybe there is this time. Maybe this time is the time the wolf is really here. I don’t know. But I’m guessing probably not.
You could start with the fact that Trump couldn’t even communicate basic information about the new travel restriction policy accurately. There have been several instances in the past week where Trump conveyed flat out wrong information that later had to be corrected (but too late, because some people are now locked in on whatever it was they heard Trump say originally regardless of later clarifications).
I haven’t seen much news today, what were the misstatements/corrections?
Things the White House had to clarify within minutes of the speech last night:
1. Europe travel bans on cargo (oops, only on people)
2. Travel ban leaving from Europe but not UK (depends on time in residence in countries, not source; and does not apply to US citizens)
3. Insurance companies cannot charge for coronavirus treatment (cannot charge for testing)
Item 1 appeared to be as-is in the prepared speech, so who knows wtf was actually intended before the speech.
Okay, those things should probably have been said more correctly but it doesn’t seem like the end of the world. I’m really more interested in the impact of the actual policies rather than getting all the words perfect.
@Edward Scizorhands
That sounds like normal “here are the exact boundaries of the policy” clarifications of a politician’s speech to me.
If you’re trying to avoid economic disruption, having the President of the United States of America signal, “Well, I think we should shut down all trade with Europe, but my advisors have talked me out of it so far” seems like kind of a big deal. How’s the market doing today, again?
It’s debatable that he said cargo would be banned. It was a confusing sentence, but my reading of it is that he’s saying cargo is exempted, but that could change.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/11/politics/read-trump-coronavirus-address/index.html
@JayT
This sentence says that the prohibitions will apply to trade and cargo, and other things as they get approval for them. “Not only trade and cargo” means “trade and cargo plus other things”, surely? An interpretation strengthened by the next paragraph:
“Anything” presumably includes “trade and cargo”.
I don’t see how it’s debatable at all.
This part:
Definitely makes it sound like cargo is banned. However, That is immediately preceded in the sentence by him talking about exemptions, so to me, it isn’t clear that he wasn’t talking about things that are banned in paragraph 1, and things that are exempted in paragraph 2. Also, he ends the second paragraph with
“Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing.”
Which would imply that they are “discussing” banning cargo, not that cargo has been banned.
It’s a confusing section where he goes from exempted, to banned, to maybe banned. I’m not surprised that they had to clarify it.
Bad faith abounds, but speaking as your ingroup, there’s room for legitimate criticism of the Trump administration’s response. (Even aside from CDC screwups.) See e.g. Ben Sixsmith here, who put well my frustration and bafflement with Trump’s response ever since this started. ETA: To be more direct: I wanted the “this is a case for railing at China” and “this is a case for economic nationalism” and “this is a case for stronger borders” Trump, and we didn’t get him. And you support those things, too, so you have to see the missed opportunity here.
I’m torn on that one. On the one hand…yes, I support those things. On the other hand, my immediate goal is “not having people die and/or the economy shut down because of the virus,” and think politicizing the disease is a bad idea that encourages others to also respond with politicization, which is also bad and makes us all incapable of solving the problem. Railing at China, economic nationalism, and strong borders aren’t going to solve the immediate problem. Let’s solve the immediate problem, and then after the crisis is over, make the political cases that the crisis wouldn’t have happened or wouldn’t have been as damaging by railing at China, promoting economic nationalism, and having stronger borders.
That’s like saying your immediate goal is having your cake and eating it too. The only way to not have people die is to shut down the economy (and more). Pick one.
Or, more realistically, pick one of the intermediate options, because there is going to be some economic disruption and some deaths no matter what. But you are at best trading one against the other.
At worst, you’re trading a few more weeks of ignorance and denial against both greater economic disruption and more deaths. Trump got dealt a bad hand in this, both in the wet markets of Wuhan and the bureaucracy of the CDC, but he’s been playing that hand particularly badly as well.
@John Schilling
I am curious what specific actions that Trump took you see as particularly bad?
Because Trump’s response has been so good (outside the obvious cock up FDA/CDC stuff) that Joe Biden literally stole his plan: https://pjmedia.com/trending/joe-biden-blasts-trumps-coronavirus-response-then-plagiarizes-trumps-plan/
But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
The FDA/CDC stuff is now mostly on Trump. Their not being prepared is on them, but that was months ago. Someone should have been on the phone to the WHO, like, six weeks ago, saying “We’ve had a bit of a snafu here; how soon can we get 50,000 of your test kits to distribute to our state public health agencies?” Trump could have made that call himself, if he couldn’t find anyone to delegate it to. And he can fire the head of the FDA if the head of the FDA doesn’t personally write the letters authorizing local and private labs to set up their own tests; that’s a thing two top-level people in an office can fix without needing the help of the Deep State bureaucracy.
There’s also the bit where he didn’t have a plan for what to do with 3,500 people on a cruise ship with an active outbreak off the California coast, because in a perverse application of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, having a plan would have meant adding to the official infection count.
There’s the EU travel and trade ban, oops no just a travel ban, oops, no, it’s now EU+UK, a month too late to do any good and rolled out in such a hamfistedly slapdash manner as to panic the markets into their worst day on over thirty years.
But probably the most consequential failing, was the month of messaging that this was no big deal, no worse than the flu, nothing to get excited about. There are at least a hundred million people who trust Trump and his loyalists over the CDC, CNN, and anyone else trying to get out accurate information on COVID-19, and a month of those people not washing their hands, postponing their family vacations, etc, is a month of unrestricted spread among a vast population.
There’s responsible don’t-panic messaging, and there’s actively encouraging complacency to score short-term political points. Trump, as usual, went with Plan B. He is now beginning to do the right thing, in both messaging and executive action, but he’s doing it far too late and with no excuse for that.
Except he specifically said for people to wash their hands, don’t touch railings etc. These are the most important things regular people can actually do. So would you agree you were mistaken here, and Trump passed this part of your critique with flying colors?
@John Schilling
I agree on the testing, although I’ll note that the FDA started the fast-track two weeks ago on the 29th.
The Diamond Princess case I don’t know the right call, but when even the Democrat governor is calling Trump’s reaction right, I am going to assume that no significant harm was done by that decision.
Dr. Fauci has said that the travel ban was a good decision, so Trump is at least listening to the experts, which he has been called on to do. Execution was sloppy, but sorted out within a day (and the markets rallied).
The last is completely unfair. Trump DID say that we were going to get cases but were prepared for it. He specifically called on people to wash their hands and disinfect in accordance with the CDC guidelines in February, using his own hand-washing and being a germophobe as an anecdote to encourage his supporters to do the same.
The extremely low numbers of tests in the US relative to other nations is an unambiguously bad sign about how we’re responding, right?
Sure there were various obstacles (and I’m sure we differ in our views of what they were and how they got there) but a determined push from the top would have helped a lot in overcoming them.
And if we’d had effective testing all along we wouldn’t have to essentially shut down large swathes of the country, as we probably will.
Yes, test production has been one of our major failures, I’d agree.
I don’t know enough about the CDC and FDA to know that for sure. But that is an area of criticism that would be reasonable. Ironically, it looks like the FDA declaring it an emergency slowed it down rather than sped it up.
@Chalid
Quickness is the opposite of FDA internal policy. They are probably the most sclerotic bureaucracy on the planet, intentionally. That is how the civil service has shaped itself. No matter what Trump and Pence and whoever directed there are several layers of resistance set up against them, not to mention the possibility of “resistance” members in the agency.
I am, as usual, entertained.
I’d say the people who generally defend Trump here have gotten more predictions right over the last five years than those who generally criticize him, which suggests something about whose model is more accurate.
From the primary, to the election, to Russiagate 1.0, to Russiagate 2.0, to the impeachment trial, and a host of smaller things along the way, the conservatives here appear to have had a more consistently correct worldview as it pertains to concrete predictions.
Past performance and all that, but I’m getting the impression a lot of people here are having some serious issues changing their minds.
Couldn’t agree more.
Are you talking about me? I’m not defending Trump’s actions as correct, because I do not know what the correct actions are. Given the nature of the problem, I do not think there necessarily are correct actions. Even if there exist correct actions, given the nature of the problem, I do not believe those dunking on Trump know what the correct actions are.
“People who attempt to dunk on Trump even when Trump obviously right attempt to dunk on Trump when Trump not obviously wrong.”
@Conrad Honcho
I think he’s saying that people like you and me who defend Trump have a better track record and that the people who are wrong about Trump regularly aren’t changing their view of him.
I may have misunderstood.
Me, I just want to see the ledger. Because it seems obvious that an informal attempt to track that sort of thing through anything other than explicit two-sided bets is going to be swamped by favorable readings and selective memory. And afaik, money hasn’t changed hands terribly often.
I thought he was saying since we’ve been right about Trump before, now when we’re wrong about Trump, we’re having a hard time changing our minds.
And I guess that’s true that the people slamming Trump right now aren’t convincing me to change my mind from “beats me” to “Trump is screwing up COVID-19,” but that’s not because I think Trump is right but because I have no idea how to evaluate whether Trump is right or wrong, I don’t think we’ll have the information necessary to do that until after this is over, and I don’t think the people criticizing Trump have the ability and information I lack either.
Generally yes. Trump’s presidency through 2019 has been outrageous but mostly harmless, and the harm has been mostly in setting precedents that may become dangerous when used by more competent presidents with a longer attention span. Too many of his critics have been, well, deranged, and this has been amusing to watch from a distance.
This has been the first real external crisis of Trump’s administration, the first time “mostly harmless” hasn’t been enough. It has revealed (or at least highlighted) a particular shortfall of skill and character that has been present all along and that, oops, we weren’t lucky enough to get through four to eight years without invoking.
Peacetime presidents (prime ministers, etc) often turn out to be unsuited to wartime leadership, so when the war comes you need to be able to reevaluate.
You don’t know that, and do not have any plausible way of knowing that, which is my point.
Conrad: My impression of you is that you are not a yuge fan of Trump, but find yourself in the position of defending him a lot.
Indeed, that is my impression of most of his defenders here. In a sense, it is my impression of those who will vote for him as well, by and large.
I wouldn’t you as saying his actions are correct, but rather pointing out that the criticisms raised, and the predictions made, are inaccurate; or, from my frame of reference, that the criticisms and predictions are being raised from a position of bias that makes it difficult to ascertain the correctness of given claims.
I’m not a fan of his either. I’d rather have a lot of other people as presidents. But I also recognize this bias and try to correct for it, which a lot of people here seem incapable of doing, I’d guess for social reasons.
We should all have a pretty clear picture by November, anyway.
Well, whether he was catasrophically wrong or not.
Might be hard to judge between if he was right and a little unlucky, or wrong and a little lucky or whatever.
There are a lot of parallels between the European travel ban and the travel ban for the seven terrorism-heavy countries–the details were either not worked our not communicated well, there was little notice, lots of relevant people expected to enforce the rule were caught flat-footed. etc. This looks like a failure to me.
I don’t remember Trump defenders predicting that he would accomplish nigh nothing while destroying decades-worth of US soft power.
@Machine Interface
I demand better bait than that.
At the time, the same thing was said of, at least: Trump’s negotiations with North Korea, his saber rattling with Iran, and his trade war. For that matter I heard similar rhetoric around the end of Net Neutrality, or his indebtedness to Russia, or later his dealings with Ukraine.
Maybe this time it’s true. Or maybe in a few months this will just be another item on list.
Those are things that had the potential to become serious crises, but fortunately didn’t. For example, none of them have killed any Americans, except possibly by secondary economic consequences of the “trade war”.
If your standard for a serious crisis is that e.g. North Korea develops thermonuclear ICBMs even if they don’t use them, then OK, you can call that a serious crisis. But if that’s the standard, then it’s a crisis where Trump’s leadership and administration clearly came up short.
While I think there is a good chance we are overreacting a bit*, there is an extremely small chance that this is all a lame non-event, just looking at how Italy’s hospital system was overwhelmed.
* By which I mean some of our inventions are causing so much economic damage that even seniors would be better off if we didn’t do them.
On changing one’s mind: A few weeks ago I admitted, against every one of my bleeding-heart liberal instincts, that Trump had brought us three years of peace and prosperity, none of the warnings about the parade of horribles he’d inflict on us had come to pass, and he deserved to be reelected. I’m still not voting for him because I disagree with him on all the issues (and I do mean all – yes, I like modern architecture, I’m the one) but that’s the only reason. “Threat to democracy”? Give me a break.
It defies all logic but I’m guessing this will turn out to be no big deal and Trump will come out smelling like roses, because that’s what’s happened every time before. My instincts are telling me no, we’ve just been lucky every time, he’s the crackhead Uber driver – but my instincts don’t have a good track record, and besides it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it.
Meanwhile the Democrats, who ought to be presenting an alternative to inspire confidence, are instead playing “Fight Song” at official congressional meetings. And that’s not some newly elected member of the Squad, that’s Donna Shalala, who was HHS secretary for eight years and really ought to know better. In the immortal words of Casey Stengel, can’t anybody here play this game?
@John and @Edward
The problem with the model of “Trump failing” on corona is that the most effective measures taken by his administration are being the first “western” nation to get into the travel ban business. His Wuhan, then China, then most of East Asian travel bans were widely panned at the time (with your gratuitous “racist” takes being incredibly common in the media).
The US West Coast is the most connected place to East Asia in “the west”, if he had followed more standard (WHO) advice, California would look like Italy on steroids. Europe on average is doing much worse than we are. The place where our response has been the worst is at the US agencies of the FDA and CDC which are places he’s required to lean on career bureaucrats to carry out effective policies. Both are notoriously slow by nature, and it would only take 1-2 highly placed “resistance” types to grind the gears to a near total halt.
@Clutzy
Italy banned flights from China before the US. Link.
Trump managed to do a great job of convincing me that he was an evil person, who would probably take pleasure in harming me. IIRC, I came to this visceral conclusion watching a video of his fans chanting “lock her up”. I understood that as meaning that to him and his fans, opposing him was a criminal act, that ought to be suppressed by the power of the state.
He didn’t keep that campaign promise of course – no criminal charges were laid against Hilary Clinton. But that video turned me from “political opposition” to something much more like hate.
And yes, I know. There was a whole meme at the time about insecure email servers, that supposedly justified this hypothetical future prosecution. It doesn’t matter – the level of hate in that chanting wasn’t consistent with the supposed provocation. I wound up hating him right back.
That hasn’t changed.
DinoNerd –
What do you think that does to your credibility on anything Trump related?
At this point I don’t bother to check the shit people say about Trump, because that has been enough of a waste of my life.
That is very far off from the meaning of what they were saying. You may want to revisit this one and why you clearly misunderstood a very clear statement.
To echo @Thegnskald above, there has been so much lies and false alarms surrounding Trump, that for me and millions of others, anything that comes out of Trump-haters’ mouths is not taken seriously at all.
The last four years have pushed me rightward, and driven my trust in anything the left says down considerably. More, it has retroactively decreased my trust in information, and framing of information, prior to the last four years.
Shifting your trust in evidence you’ve built your priors around shifts your priors a hell of a lot.
@DinoNerd:
> I came to this visceral conclusion watching a video of his fans chanting “lock her up”. I understood that as meaning that to him and his fans, opposing him was a criminal act, that ought to be suppressed by the power of the state.
I’m not a fan of Trump, and have never chanted “lock her up”, but I don’t think your interpretation is correct. Instead, I think the feeling was that Clinton (correctly) believed herself to have been above the law, and the chanters were declaring that once Trump was elected, she would be subject to penalties. They (and I) genuinely believed that she had flouted the law regarding the handling of classified information, and should be punished. Factual or not, the underlying issue was her apparent flagrant violation of the law rather than her opposition to Trump.
> He didn’t keep that campaign promise of course – no criminal charges were laid against Hilary Clinton.
I don’t like the “of course” here. While it might be true, in the absence of investigation I don’t think it’s in any way obvious that Clinton did not violate the law. Without personal knowledge, how can one be sure of this? Or do you mean that because of her position in society it’s clear that criminal charges would never be filed against her regardless of the legality of her actions? If so, I think this is the part that really bothers others.
> There was a whole meme at the time about insecure email servers, that supposedly justified this hypothetical future prosecution
I think it’s highly misleading to dismiss this as merely a “meme”. Are you aware that the “Judicial Watch v US Department of State” is in fact still rolling right along, and that earlier this month the judge issued a sharply worded order, which subpeonas Google for the remainder of Clinton’s emails and requires Clinton and Cheryl Mills to appear in person for deposition?
The order also makes very clear the judge’s frustration with the State Department’s responses to date:
“With each passing round of discovery, the Court is left with more questions than answers. What’s more, during the December 19, 2019 status conference, Judicial Watch disclosed that the FBI recently produced approximately thirty previously undisclosed Clinton emails. State failed to fully explain the new email’s origins when the Court directly questioned where they came from. Furthermore, State has not represented to the Court that the private emails of State’s former employees who corresponded with Secretary Clinton have been searched for additional Clinton emails. State has thus failed to persuade the Court that all of Secretary Clinton’s recoverable emails have been located. This is unacceptable.”
This is a pissed-off judge who feels he’s been given the run-around. The order is full of other “choice words” directed at the State Department. If your current view is that the whole affair is nothing but a meme, I think you might find it interesting reading: http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2020/images/03/02/hrc.pdf.
@Clutzy
Do you have a cite for this? I’ve heard this from a variety of Trump defenders (including Trump himself), but never came across any actual criticism in the wild.
“Guiding Trump’s response is a hardheaded nationalism. On January 31, the administration announced strict travel bans: Most foreign nationals who’d recently been to China were barred from entering the U.S., and Americans were warned to stay clear of the country.” Also said he would “double down on xenophobic suspicions.”
Biden slams Trump response to coronavirus epidemic: This is no time for “fearmongering” “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia…”
I don’t know exactly what sources count as “the left” or “the media” or whatever. Just search for “Trump China travel ban racist” and you’ll find pages of either left/media articles calling the travel ban racist, or right wing outlets calling out the left/media articles for calling the travel ban racist.
@DinoNerd
Dems taunt Trump with threats of prison time
@zzzrot, along with what Conrad posted, one think I’d like people attacking Trump’s response to do is show prominent left wing figures proposing things that Trump should have been doing in December, Jan, Feb, etc. In December and January, while Trump assembled a C-19 taskforce and worked up a travel restriction plan Democrats…worked on an impeachment that was always going to fail.
@Thegnskald
Since about the only thing I say about him is variants on “I hate him” – specifically, I language, referring to my own emotions – probably nothing at all.
I do believe in character, and my opinion of Trump’s character is that he’s probably sociopathic, and also probably takes positive pleasure in demonstrating his powerfulness by causing fear and/or pain, but I’m not out there making statements about what he’s doing or what the probable consequences of the latest action “obviously” are.
That would be either preaching to the choir, or casting pearls before swine. His followers won’t be convinced, and his opponents could stand to talk about something else for a change.
@Aapje
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
@Honcho
The first piece seems somewhat ambiguous. It’s definitely critical of Trump, and claims that his xenophobia will hamper an effective response to the virus. But, about the travel ban in particular, it says ‘These measures—which career public-health officials argued were needed to delay the virus’s spread—broke with guidance from the World Health Organization, which did not recommend curbs on travel or trade.’ where ‘career public health official’ is blue tribe code for good guy.
The Biden piece doesn’t mention travel restrictions at all; it knocks Trump for cutting funding for the CDC (which I don’t think he actually did, to be fair, just proposed), and again accuses him of xenophobia.
The suggested google search gives me a least a fact check page saying ‘None of the party’s congressional leaders and none of the Democratic candidates running for president have directly criticized that decision, though at least two Democrats have.’ Other results were mostly right wing sources decrying people being mean to Trump, using the same sources, and a hoax about a Chuck Schumer tweet.
And just as a comparison, for the ban from predominantly muslim countries more or less every democrat is clearly on the record calling for the ban to be rescinded and generally claiming the policy is racist, eg pelosi, biden, sanders, aoc. There’s an idea on the right that the left will call anything they do racist no matter what, but it does seem to actually depend on the particulars.
It occurs to me that the current crisis may actually give us a decently objective way to judge Trump’s competence. Once the dust settles, we could compare fatality rates between different countries and see how America stacks up against the rest.
@Clutzy:
Whose “gratuitous takes” now? You specifically namechecked me and Edward on this one. I haven’t accused anyone of racism in this manner, and I don’t see where Edward has either. I don’t like being accused of racism, I don’t go around accusing other people of racism without a very good reason, and I also don’t like being accused of gratuitously accusing other people of racism.
So knock it off with the “evil meanies are falsely accusing poor innocent me of being a racist” shtick. That’s not what you are being accused of.
@john
I didn’t say you called me racist, I said Trump was called racist by the media. And I’ve elaborated that no one has pointed to Biden, Bernie, Pete, or Warren talking about aggressive anti-Corona measures in January. Biden called the Chinese travel ban “hysterical xenophobia and fearmongering”. I don’t think you can get any stronger version of a 180 than the standard Dem/Centerleft media position in Jan-Feb 2020 and their current stance in mid-March 2020.
You said “your gratuitous racist takes”, when you were specifically talking to me and Edward. Not “the media’s racist takes”, mine and Edward’s. I’m not the media, I don’t own the media, I’m pretty sure Edward doesn’t either, and you didn’t mention the media, only me and Edward.
Please go take some time away from this issue until you can think more clearly about what you really want to say.
John, that’s just a common figure of speech to refer to a generality. It’s definition 3 here.
@Jaskologist
Hard disagree. If America stacks up well, at best that tells you that Trump didn’t screw up badly. And if America stacks up badly, Trump could have done things near perfectly, and it could end up being because some city mayor or state governor or CDC official screwed up terribly.
On the one hand even in the presence of poor leadership, America may do better as a nation because it’s less dense and has more warm and humid areas than lots of Europe and East Asia.
On the other hand even in the presence of great national leadership, America may do worse as a nation because it is more decentralized, and Americans hate restrictions on their liberty.
@John
I’m not the one who needs to re-evauluate myself.
This is you:
In your own words. All you did was click your tongue at people worrying about C-19. This appears to be the first open thread in which you expressed any serious worry about the virus (strangely around the same time as the media anti-Trump freakout) and immediately started banging the Trump bad hammer.
On February 7th, yes, I was predicting that it probably wasn’t going to be too bad.
On February 24th, I was lamenting the shortage of hard data with which to assess how bad it was going to be. That’s something the CDC among others should have been much better at providing, and unlike myself, POTUS doesn’t need to just lament the CDC not providing him with enough information.
It’s the government’s job to be prepared for worst-case as well as best-guess outcomes, so even on the 7th they should have been on the ball about making sure they had enough test kits to positively track whatever was going to be happening. And, contrary to your “immediately started banging the Trump bad hammer” bit, I’ve been quite clear that the early failings in that matter were not Trump’s fault. And I’ve been pushing back on the “millions will die because Trump screwed up” hysteria as well. Possibly that fairness on my part is wasted effort, and since I’m not welcome in your tribe I might as well signal my loyalty to the other tribe.
But your guy has long since exhausted any credit he once had on “the bureaucracy screwed up, how was I to know!” grounds.
So, at the time when any plausible quarantine measures would have been really effective (early Feb/Late Jan ) you were predicting the opposite. By Feb 24 when we already had data it was a particularly bad disease you lamented the lack of data.
I really don’t know what to say. You are blaming Trump. No one on the right says he’s been perfect, or even good. But the best evidence we have is that all the prominent Democrats would have been much worse, because they wouldn’t have closed any borders until March, I’m not sure if any has even talked approvingly of the idea yet. None were talking about aggressive corono responses in February, it basically was not an issue with them.
I still find it bizarre that the US seems to be trying to avoid testing people. From the outside it looks like an attempt to keep the official numbers down.
Travel ban seems a tad pointless since it’s now firmly spread to the US.
“quickly! We must shut the stable door before the horses bolt!”
[a week later, shuts the stable door]
“Acting on the advice of experts I have shut the stable door!”
[supporters]:”What more do you want? he did what the experts told him to do!”
It’s incompetence, and also red tape, and also IRB nonsense https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html
I don’t know if it’s avoiding testing, so much as rationing tests (the shortage of tests being the central regulatory failure, rather than the testing guidelines).
Any wet-behind-the-ears apprentice conspiracy theorist can find some really nasty explanations for the testing debacle. A journeyman conspiracy theorist can find even worse explanations for the overall handling of the disease in the US, if not globally. And I’m not sure what a master could find – my talents don’t stretch that far, even by imagining that I’m reading a political thriller rather than the lastest news articles.
I’m still inclined to favour incompetence, with a smidgen of short sighted, short term but ordinary self interest.
It’s not only too late to make a difference, it’s also completely useless as formulated. French people who had planned to travel to the US sometimes soon are already changing their flight so that it leaves from the UK instead.
If they wanted something useful they should do what Israel or Lebanon is doing: ban anyone who has stayed more than 6 hours in a hotspot country (with quarantine for returning citizens). But it’s way too late for that anyway.
Everytime I think I might give Trump the benefit of the doubt, he somehow manages to immediatly shatter any illusion that he seems to know what he’s doing.
It’s also completely useless as formulated. French people who had planned to travel to the US sometimes soon are already changing their flight so that it leaves from the UK instead.
The policy isn’t “as long as you leave from the UK you are OK.” One reason that the UK is exempted is because they are sharing their flight information, and we can tell if you are just skipping through the UK to get into the US.
https://twitter.com/DHS_Wolf/status/1237915985476227078
The White House had to walk back three separate things Trump said last night within minutes of his speech, so confusion about this policy is normal.
I would prefer not to call an inability to communicate important polices that impact thousands or millions of people “normal”.
I don’t think he’s saying Trump is normal, he’s saying the you’re normal if you are confused by him.
The expert Sam Harris interviewed recently (link) mentioned flight bans as a way to react to a pandemic.
Conclusion: it does a reasonable but not an amazing amount (delays the worst by a couple of weeks – I forgot the numbers). However, that was based on the assumption that the ban goes in place early afair, so this should be significantly less effective. Closing schools would contribute more.
So it’s too late and it’s not the right lever and it’s not enough. Still, I think it’s the right decision. It should save some lives.
Banning travel from Europe, at this point, gets me a “meh.” We are probably going to have an order of magnitude more cases from local transmission than imported cases from the EU (especially since American citizens are exempt — unless they will be held in quarantine?).
But it’s a common tactic, and people really shouldn’t be flying around the world during a pandemic anyway. There are other more important things to complain about.
the ‘trump speak’ assertion seems unfalsifiable, since most americans, and the rest of the world don’t speak this language. i would also argue that he shouldn’t use this private language given that most of the world does not understand it.
A detailed summary of COVID to date, highlighting how the reactions from different countries and regions have produced wildly different results, and why delaying action even a day can have massive consequences.
How are we supposed to act on such negative truth claims?
If you live with a spouse, parents, or roommates, you generally don’t have the authority to forbid them going to
When those all remain open for business. And we have jobs to go to that can’t be switched to work from home.
Seems like it’s 100% up to the government.
> Seems like it’s 100% up to the government.
I disagree. It’s more like 50% up to the government. Skipping things like work or buying groceries is difficult for most people. But converting from the gym to a walk in a park, or a theater to a night in can be done on an individual level.
My job can be switched to work from home. Should I ask my boss to let me do this or nah?
Have there been cases or risk areas* near your work or near where your colleagues live? Are your colleagues in the habit of traveling to risk areas?
If not, there seems relatively little risk.
* Airports, tourist hot spots, Italian/Chinese restaurants**
** Just kidding on this last one
Is there a website or app or something where you can put in your zip-code and it tells you the infection rate for your area? Or is this the kind of thing local papers are good for?I don’t think this question makes sense based on the numbers at the moment.
I’d like to take appropriate measures, but it feels unnecessary to strictly isolate ourselves if there aren’t active cases nearby.
Staying away from the amusement parks and hospitals seems like an obvious move, of course.
My State is delaying the release of specific information because of a 1955 syphilis privacy law.
Probably yes, with reservation that I do not know anything about your personal situation.
I talked to my boss and she said there’s a meeting about this at lunch so who knows. I might get told to stay home.
Personally, I think any employer who has employees that can work from home should encourage them to do so, even if their area doesn’t appear to have been hit by the virus yet. Helps protect the employees individually, the community generally (limiting opportunities for transmission), and also provides significant risk mitigation for the employer (would you rather take the productivity hit from people working from home, or roll the dice and hope nobody get sick, knowing that if there is an outbreak in the office you could be down 50-80% of your staff for weeks)?
I’ve been pretty anti-alarmist here, but this as struck me as an obvious and reasonable course of action pretty much since the virus reached the States.
If your employer has not been preparing for people to remotely work (if possible), they are pretty dumb. I don’t know the odds of travel restrictions in your area but they aren’t 0.0% over the next few months. (Even if this whole virus were a hoax there would still be the chance of it happening because of over-reaction.)
Yes.
There are tons of jobs where we physically have to touch stuff or the work doesn’t get done. No reason not to try to move every desk job to home from the bottom-up if it hasn’t been done top-down like last week.
I think trying to work from home, if that is available, once there is a 1 – 3% chance that someone in your office has the virus is a good policy.
It seems reasonable that true cases in the U.S. are probably between 20 and 100 times higher than reported cases. (In Wuhan, at the date they locked down the province, it was 27 times more.) Already there are ~ 1k reported cases (I’m using numbers from Johns Hopkins CSSE), decently widely spread out, so let’s say that means there are actually 27k around the US, or about one person in a thousand. If you work in an office building visited by 1000 other people, it’s already time to ask to work remotely. And that seems to be what every major tech company has figured out: stayinghome.club has a list of all the tech companies with mandatory or encouraged work-from-home rules newly implemented. If it’s you and three other dudes who you know live quiet lives at home, then maybe wait another few weeks, what the heck.
Some links: https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article241141661.html
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
One person in 10,000, actually. Still, if we run your numbers, that’s about an 8% chance someone in the office is infected. I’m sure it could be refined based on number of cases in that state vs state population and the like, though.
So what happens if you work in an Amazon fulfillment center in WA? In Kentucky?
@Le Maistre Chat
Running the numbers it looks like the Lexington fulfillment centers have 600 employees, and if we assume ~200 real cases in Kentucky that’s a chance of between 2% and 3% chance of a carrier.
@Nick
Sheesh, yeah, I was in a hurry, and I guess at least I should be glad my analysis made it kind of obvious that I wasn’t actually being sufficiently careful with my numbers. Seems like I managed to be mostly right by being wrong by x10 once in each direction. (Overestimated by 10x the national prevalence, but underestimated how prevalence translates into likelihood a coworker is infected by x10 or so, and on net, not crazy far off.)
@Conrad Honcho
Playing still more with my 27000 infections number, and using Nick’s helpful wolfram alpha formula, if you have 120 employees at your office, odds are maybe about 1% that one person or more is a carrier. The CDC seems to put the doubling period at about 7 days, so by next Friday, if there will then be 54000 cases, then company spaces with 60 coworkers will have a 1% or so chance that one is a carrier.
If your decision-tree gives you a lot of space to pick the exact day to immediately start working from home, you could use this sort of math to try and get it exactly right… but a lot of people can’t work from home at all, and maybe it’s more realistic for you to model yourself as having a once-per-week ability to rejigger your willingness to really push your boss to switch to having folks work at home… unless it’s a pretty small office, you might as well start really pushing now. (Or that’s my analysis–IANAD, IANA-epidemiologist.)
I’m working from home right now. The meeting my boss had yesterday was apparently what to do about customer-facing employees, which was mainly mitigation strategies. Nothing about the back-end people like me who could work from home yet. She said, “it’s not required, but if you want to work from home I won’t stop you.” And I said, “then that’s what I’ll do.”
ETA: I would also like to take this opportunity to point and laugh at Past Conrad, who in the thread about the “impact of coronavirus” a month or two ago rated the likely personal impact of the virus on him as a 1. Haha, that guy’s an idiot.
Incidentally, I got the formula from Alex Tabarrok. He writes a little about the numbers; what affects the percent the most is how many people are in the group.
Now for the next two steps. If COVID-19 has an R0 of 2.5, that means an average associate of a carrier has a (2.5/Dunbar’s number) or 1.7% chance of themselves being infected. So, 8% * 1.7% = 0.13% chance of being infected in that office environment. COVID-19 mortality among the working-age population is 0.67%, so
0.13% * 0.67% = 0.00089% probability of death for coming in to work the next two weeks in this hypothetical. Just under one in a hundred thousand.
Except, probably better than that because R0 goes down as people start taking basic precautions like extra hand-washing and fewer meetings, and the baseline R0 is already weighted by high-risk cases like hospital workers taking care of fully symptomatic individuals.
My workplace is going to have an outbreak if we don’t get our shit together fast. We have local community transmission as of yesterday, a salad bar, and weekly, packed 250+ person gatherings. But they’re just recommending we stop “close contact” with each other.
Judging by the symptoms and contagiousness, my entire workplace caught it about 6 weeks ago. Only one person even missed a day of work. But we don’t have any baby boomers here.
It seems highly unlikely that it was the coronavirus, as opposed to some other illness with similar but milder symptoms.
For the majority of people, covid-19 has incredibly mild symptoms. A light cough for a week or two is it. The only person who caught a fever was diabetic. This tracks with what I’ve read.
???
The WHO report lists the incidence of fever at 88%. Barring fresher data, it’s literally the most common symptom.
A light cough for a week or two is it.
Ah, no? The symptoms, so you can tell you may have something more than a cold or a dose of the normal flu, according to our Health Service are:
If most people in your workplace only had “a light cough” then they all got colds (probably from one another if they turned up to work while sick), not the coronavirus.
It is even possible that it is a coronavirus. But not the coronavirus that started somewhere in the city of Wuhan sometimes in late 2019 early 2020, and is running amok around the planet since than.
I stand corrected. It stood out to me as unique due to the mildness of the symptoms, the duration of the infection and how incredibly infectious it was. Never had one like it before.
Is your advice to spouse/parents/roomates that they avoid public gatherings 100% ineffective just because those things are open for business? Is the government going to switch 100% of your household’s jobs to work-from-home? Does it take a government order to get your family to wash their hands?
If no, then it’s not 100% up to the government.
I mean, if just going to the gym is one of the best vectors short of environments where there’s a crowd jostling together or handshakes and greater physical contact are part of a ritual (like church), my personal willingness to avoid the gym until the pandemic passes counts for nothing unless my advice is as 100% effective as real authority. If you’re a woman and your husband insists on touching gym equipment in a crowded place 4 days a week, you are going to get the gym’s coronavirus anyway and ought to go all the same days to get the benefits of lifting.
Is there a safe way to use the gym? Is it necessarily a petri dish?
If I wash my hands regularly in the gym, am I saving myself?
Not if the virus is airborne, right?
Can’t you convince them to just do burpees at home or go jogging or something for a couple weeks?
If the virus is airborne, the grocery store seems as bad as the gym.
@Chalid:
I am trying, but we’re also getting opposite signals from family who don’t live with us (eg. my over-55 mother-in-law who hates Trump still says “go to the gym if the CDC and the governor don’t say otherwise”). Ugh.
@Edward Scizorhands:
Not pumping iron for a few weeks is an option. We can’t avoid the grocery store at this point. We have toilet paper, filtered municipal water, dog food, beans and brown rice, canned tuna and mayo, and a mix of frozen and perishable breakfast ingredients, but we’re going to have to go out at least one more time under the existing viral conditions, more if we don’t succeed in hitting a place with abundant supplies.
Even before the current pandemic, I heard that it was good practice to sanitize gym equipment before using it and good etiquette to clean after using the shared equipment.
Maybe this can be pitched as an opportunity to tryout a new training routine that works out different muscles
The gym is worse than a grocery store, because people breathe deeper and faster there.
The whole reason humans have muscles is so that we can navigate and manipulate an enormous world full of not-gyms. I’m pretty sure that we can adequately develop and exercise our muscles in the remaining not-gym parts of the world. So what’s the deal with everyone insisting that they have to go to the gym to exercise?
I’m guessing that gym-going is basically a social thing, that even if you’re not actively talking to people, vigorous activity in a room full of other people similarly engaged tickles the gregarious ape-brain in a way that e.g. climbing a mountain doesn’t. OK, sure, that’s reasonable. But if the order of the day is social distancing, “How do I safely engage in vigorous sweaty exercising in a room full of strangers?” is not the right question to be asking.
The gym-going probably has a social purpose for many, but for others it’s a way of obtaining use of fancy exercise machines without having to buy and store them. Certainly you can exercise without them, but a lot of people find using the machines more pleasant than the alternative.
OK, but from the looks of it the fancy machines are just an expensive way of duplicating the effect and experience of walking, running, riding a bicycle, and/or lifting weights. Do people really find riding a bicycle in a converted warehouse to be more pleasant than e.g. riding a bicycle on a bicycle path?
I’ll give you the residents of cities with perpetual rain and cities with no bike paths or safe roads, but I’m seeing an awful lot of gyms in places without those excuses.
Dedicated bicycle paths you can actually get serious exercise on are few and far between; usually if you want to ride hard you have to be on the road, which has its own problems. You’re also at the mercy of the weather, and the difficulty of your workout is not easy to control. On a bike trainer, no weather issues, and the workout is exactly as hard as I choose. Personally I prefer riding outside (when the weather is good), but I probably get better exercise on the trainer.
I imagine similar issues apply to treadmills.
To add to what Nybbler is saying about the functional benefits of a gym, I think there can be psychological benefits to the environment that facilitate exercise.
Some of us have to stack the deck and trick our monkey brains into doing things we want it to do(assuming you accept this framing of the human experience), and gyms can help with that.
Yes, going to a place to workout is helpful to me working out. I’ve had days where I’ve said “oh, I’ll just do some planks/dumbbells at home,” and have a very low success rate actually following through.
I am definitely mentally preparing myself for fewer or even no gym days at some point.
Conan reviews #20: “The Scarlet Citadel”
Originally published in Weird Tales, January 1933. Beaten for the cover by “Buccaneers of Venus”.
Frank Frazetta illustrated it.
King Conan stands on a battlefield with “the pick of his chivalry” all dead around him, none having fled. (He’s said to have brought 5,000 knights, so if that’s “the pick” rather than a supreme effort, Aquilonia’s military resources must approximate France’s circa Agincourt.) He came as an ally of King Amalrus of Ophir to the south, whose plea for help was a double-cross: at Ophir’s southern border, he joins forces with purported enemy King Strabonus of Koth. Tsotha-lanti, the wizard of Koth, forces his king to take Conan alive. Tsotha does this by touching him where the mail was hacked away, with a ring that has a retractible spike.
The king sends his General Arbanus to the Aquilonian border, to “invest the city of Shamar”, while kings and wizard withdraw the wounded with part of the baggage train to Koth’s capital. Conan recovers chained in a citadel. The rulers say they’ll free him and give him gold if he’ll abdicate. He says:
Conan the libertarian!
The King of Ophir wants to kill Conan, but Tsotha casts a temporary blindness spell with a powder to stop him. He has him chained down in the dungeon instead.
The first dungeon encounter is with an eighty-foot venomous snake (why would such a huge snake evolve venom – what larger prey would it need to hunt?). The outer door suddenly clangs and the snake slithers away. The source of the noise is a gigantic black nudist, taunting Conan with the keys: “What will you give me for them?” This guy is taunting him because when Conan was a corsair, he sacked a walled village called Abombi. The man’s brother died, Conan (and presumably Belit, not named here) sailed away with the loot, and this man ended up enslaved by Stygians for lack of village defenses. Conan of course has to be reminded because he’s killed a LOT of people’s brothers.
Holy crap, Conan was the original M. Bison.
He offers his tormentor’s weight in gold pieces for the keys, but money can’t buy what he’s lost! He wants bloody revenge.
(Laughing “Tsotha will never know!” at the top of his lungs just makes me think he’s Dan Backslide.)
Anyway, at that moment the snake darts out to make him its dinner, and the dead guy drops those precious keys.
Now Conan is free in a locked dungeon with monsters and possibly traps. He just needs to find some other Player Characters for this story to hit full RPG mode. Next, Shukeli the eunuch/chief jailer, who had followed his stolen keys, confronts Conan from behind a barred gate. He gets stabbed through said gate for his trouble.
Conan thinks he hears a woman weeping and skulks in that direction, but…
Running away, he trips over something and loses his only torch. Some Lovecraftian horrors are insinuated, then Conan finds another prisoner, held in bondage with weird vines. Freed, he says he’s Pelias, a rival sorcerer.
(That’s the planet Yag-Kosha and all his kin came from. “The Tower of the Elephant” was actually the next story written after this one.)
The wise man explains the dungeon’s backstory:
(Interestingly enough, one of the largest subterranean towns in the real world was rediscovered when a local homeowner was doing renovation in his basement and discovered a mysterious room behind a wall. That was only forty years after it was abandoned, though.)
Pelias casts a Fear spell on the snake, briefly animates the dead Shukeli, and scries on Shamar. Conan says it’s hopeless to rally his kingdom if they escape, because Shamar is a day’s ride and the capital five more. So Pelias summons a winged creature “neither bat nor bird”, from the far reaches of the skies, its species unguessed of men, for Conan to ride. Pelias says it’s OK to split the party: he’ll cast another spell and catch up at Shamar.
Meanwhile at the capital, Count Trecero whom Conan left in authority tries to be honorable, but the commons riot out of distrust of each noble’s ignoble past, making an opening for one Prince Arpello to seize the baton and declare himself king. Class conflict is narrated at length. Suddenly, Conan awes the people with his supernatural authority by simply landing the Lovecraftian bird-bat on a tower. Arpello attacks him and gets thrown off the tower.
After the necessary time for persuasion and logistics, King Conan rides to lift the siege of Shamar.
You say, without having stayed to watch. What a Bond villain.
Strabonus with vastly superior force plucks defeat from the jaws of victory by getting into single combat with Conan, whose zweihander crushes his skull through its helmet. So the invaders’ morale is hurt. In the general retreat, Conan recklessly chases Tsotha for revenge.
He must feel really good about himself. The kingdom is safe and personal revenge was had– or no, what’s this? Tsotha’s head still glares at him, and a sightless body gropes for its head. Luckily the wise man Pelias prepared for contingencies beyond a barbarian’s ken: an eagle swoops down to fly away with the head and laughs with Pelias’ voice.
I love that ending. I also love the whole middle section with Conan in the dungeon, despite any and all literary shortcomings.
I don’t sympathize a lot with Conan, though. My attention is drawn more to Pelias and the Phyrric-victorious Aquilonia. We’re told:
That’s 6,400 professional warriors/landowners/administrators and countless commoners dead. Seems like an absolute disaster for the victors.
Your thoughts?
Pelias is vastly more powerful than the half-demon Tsotha-Lanti. Everything Tsotha-Lanti does, with the exception of his ability to not die despite decapitation, is just weird chemistry/alchemy stuff. Pelias animates the dead, calls a byakhee, trivially scries on his enemies, and spooks a quasi-divine snake with sheer wizardliness.
Interestingly, this presages The People of The Black Circle: “A human steeped in the dark arts is greater than a devil.”
+1
Pelias even says “Tsotha was only able to throw me in the dungeon because my guard is down when I drink. Man do I love wine.”
Yet for all that he’s way more powerful, it didn’t leave me an obvious impression that he was bullying a weaker sorcerer.
Conan should really know better by now than to trust the Kothians, isn’t this at least the second time they pulled something sneaky re: peace treaties or not being enemies, then turned on the forces Conan was fighting with?
why would such a huge snake evolve venom – what larger prey would it need to hunt?
You probably shouldn’t ask that question in this kind of story 🙂
That’s actually a neat little bit of context, showing that the dashing freebooter lifestyle has consequences; yeah it’s all fun and treasure-hunting for Conan and crew, but the people who get looted suffer, and suffer from a chain of problems arising out of that raid. Despite what Disney tried to do, pirates are not fun happy people who commit victimless crimes!
I was actually hoping for Conan respond along the lines of “Then I shall return and give you my head, once I have seen to my kingdom and those who would despoil it! This I swear; only do not make the people of Aquilonia suffer for my misdeeds!” There has to be a last Conan story, and that would have been a fitting end.
Would he have kept such a promise? Conan is no Gawain.
Conan would definitely return for a fight, but he would never simply surrender his life.
In “Shadows in the Moonlight” it wasn’t intentional treachery: a rebel prince hired mercenaries, lost his rebellion and was like “Sorry, sire. Peace?” The clever angle was showing a nice honest peace treaty from the view of po’ people rather than the government.
Oh right.
And yeah, it’s a really neat bit of context.
To be more serious than really necessary –
A) It might have been an overgrown/magically supersized species of smaller size
B) Big snakes tend to kill their prey by constriction and then swallow them whole. However, there might be some things in Conan’s world that are difficult to constrict to death (things that don’t breath? things that are too hard? things that don’t die? most things do tend to at least be affected by blunt trauma though…)
C) A lot of snakes have venom for DEFENSE as much as offense. What larger predator should it fear?
I guess one neat thing about a potential Biden presidency is that it might be fun to watch the “president doesn’t need to cooperate with investigations” crowd whipsaw to a different position at lightspeed.
Continuing a discussion i started on the last fractional open thread…is this the new normal, or is everyone involved going to just laugh this off in 25 years?
My (completely unsubstantiated) feeling is that things will only get worse. Everything feels very Late Republic
“Happy republics are all alike, but each unhappy republic is unhappy in its own way.” –Nott Tolstoy
I have the same feeling about how our civic decay is currently experiencing a Late Republic moment–environmental spoilage and lead in the aqueducts/flint pipes, professionalization of military to point wars are waged by professional class for profit, not by society for defense or ideals, decline of trust, breakdown of social mores and marriage, increasing birth control, declining family, declining fertility rates, economic grandeur masking brittle overextensions… a lot is similar. Still, I think it may be the too-easy prediction that we’ll follow the Late Republic story. There are many things in our era with no equivalent or analog in other eras. High tech and 20-million-people-in-a-city density and global disease and pictures of the earth from space and foreign invasion risk and monetary policy and literacy and and and—all these things are wildly different now than in Rome, and it seems as likely that major facets of conventional human nature are going to break (e.g. sex with humans might become less good than sex with bots!–the internet may become consistently more fun for all than meatspace–things are very unstable with the level of tech we have now). We may be about to embark on something very much without analog from history. Maybe we’re about to die in whatever pandemic starts next year. Maybe Putin is going to get diagnosed with something terminal and pick a nuclear fight for funsies. Maybe social technology will spawn an authority-less big-brother state. Dunno, but I don’t really expect you can make a prediction that will usefully pay rent on the idea that all institutions will only get worse.
You should all read Ross Douthat’s new book The Decadent Society.
Things will be bad for a while followed by several centuries of unrivalled prosperity?
One oughtn’t take the Roman obsession with decay at face value.
Right. Rome in the first century BC was an extraordinarily confident society, easily able to defeat their enemies. That’s why the fall of a Rome is a better comparison. You had a constantly declining civilization that still had a lot of prestige but was falling apart.
But one connection I haven’t anyone make is Rome right before the crisis of the third century. A resurgent enemy state. More intimidating barbarians. An unknown plague sweeping the country. A decadent society that doesn’t believe its old gods but doesn’t have new ones. A government that is increasingly losing its legitimacy. Even Trump could be thought of as a kind of Commodus like figure, more concerned with his vanity than anything else. Commodus wanted to be a gladiator, the reality stars of Rome. Rome survived their crisis. Will we survive ours?
We need some new gods maybe
I’ll sadly note just for the sake of humility and lols that I thought you were referring to this republic not this one
I’d be pretty surprised if the similarity was coincidental.
It’s not coincidental. Though I’ve heard claims that Star Wars is actually the story of the second Vatican council.
How does that work?
McGhan I think is a non-central case. The argument against Trump cooperating with the Democrats’ investigations was that the investigations were not properly initiated. Few people argued the Executive was immune to investigation. So no, you would not get a whipsaw, you would get two different arguments.
“The President has to respond to properly initiated investigations. The investigations of Trump were not properly initiated.”
“The President has to respond to properly initiated investigations. The investigations of Biden were properly initiated.”
This discussion was literally a week ago. It can be (is, I’d argue) true that the legal process sometimes produces facially preposterous results, but you can’t just ignore them because you’d prefer a different system.
I think the exact problem is that no one can articulate what “properly initiated” means in this context, and in the absence of a rigorous accounting, it really does mean the executive is immune to investigation if he or she wants to be. There’s no “properly initiated” subclause in any part of congress’ investigatory powers, or for that matter the justice departments, so we’d have to dream up an exception specific to the executive (all matter of weirdness results if it’s a *general* exception). The exception would go something like this: “The executive need not comply with a baseless investigation initiated purely to serve a political agenda, but must comply with one that is credibly linked to actual wrongdoing”
My previous threads have attempted (perhaps inartfully) to explain why this exception doesn’t work. For one thing, sometimes investigations are BOTH credible and largely motivated by partisan rancor, for another, we can only meaningfully talk about “wrongdoing” or “credible” if we’re able to investigate. Literally everyone targeted by an investigation (criminal or otherwise) since time began has initiated their defense by saying “I have come under suspicion for a baseless reason.”
So who decides what “properly initiated” means?
If “properly initiated” is simply what either congress or the executive thinks it means, we’re right back here again, and I’ve dedicated two previous fractional open threads to trying to explain why it’s unlikely (and potentially dangerous) for courts to continually step in and ajudicate whether this or that investigation is “baseless” or “has merit”
EDIT: Added some stuff to clarify the difficulties involved in applying a “properly initiated” rule in practice.
I would have liked for the courts to do that, but after reading your explanation of McGhan last week it seems like they didn’t. “Properly initiated” would be “in accordance with precedent.” The argument on Trump’s side was that in previous impeachment investigations the full House voted to exercise its impeachment powers before it started issuing subpoenas and this time the Speaker just said “investigation started” and then committees started doing it. “House has sole power of impeachment,” sure, but that doesn’t mean they can just do whatever they want. They can’t declare “impeachment” means “trial by combat, get your nets and tridents.”
I don’t want this thread to turn into 50 back-and-forths as to why this is or isn’t a good argument. I’m just saying I would want the courts to settle that argument, whether I agreed with their decision or not.
A man can dream, can’t he? CSPAN would be awesome.
You have correctly identified these as two different arguments.
I disagree with your stance but agree that I would like it settled, but it’s an easy issue to table. Because – and this is the point I’m trying to hammer – in the McGahn case the administration walked into court and made the other argument. It has carried the day, and pending appeal the precedent now set is that the Executive is functionally immune to investigation whenever it pleases (and impeachment is an acceptable response by Congress to such obstinance). We are in a situation now where the acceptable outcomes all probably require SCOTUS deciding to disregard the arguments actually in front of it in favor of granting itself novel powers of oversight, then immediately putting those powers to use on the most fractious political issue in decades. Not great.
Well of course, the constitution for this reason specifies an objective formulation of what is necessary for impeachment to be tried in the senate: “…no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present…”
What the constitution doesn’t do is provide an enormous list of addenda for how impeachments are to be carried out in the house, what constitutes an “impeachable offense”, etc. The founders generally recognized it would be foolish to do that.
I guess to re-center to my initial question: you seem to be saying that the period of executive nocooperation will be transient, perhaps because in the future congresses will scrupulously follow relevant precedent insomuch as it can be determined, when they set out to investigate?
I don’t really have a prediction for what will happen. From my reading, what I would have liked to have happened is:
1) House scrupulously follows precedent when they set out to investigate.
2) Executive either cooperates or, exercising due diligence in protecting the independence of the Executive branch, challenges validity of House investigation in the courts.
3) Court correctly rules on said arguments. If the ruling is in favor of the Executive, the House shuts up. If in favor of the House, the Executive either complies, or the House impeaches the President for non-compliance, as ruled on by the courts.
Instead my reading of the situation is:
1) House doesn’t follow precedent and issues possibly invalid subpoenas.
2) Executive defies them with bad argument instead of good argument.
3) House doesn’t wait for ruling on bad argument and impeaches anyway, failing to convict in the Senate.
4) Court eventually rules accepting the bad arguments, setting bad precedents.
And now everything is screwed. It would have been really nice for everybody if Pelosi had just gone through the exact same impeachment process everyone agrees was fair for Nixon and Clinton. There are other issues with Johnson’s impeachment that aren’t relevant, but we’ve got two recent impeachments of presidents from both parties, and pretty much everyone agrees they were treated fairly. Instead she played partisan political games and now everything is screwed up for everyone.
It’s worth asking yourself, if it’s such an astoundingly bad argument, how at least two commentors on this forum predicted, in advance, that the administration would make this argument, and a court would buy it.
I’m not saying it was the most likely result, or the one I agree with, but it’s a completely reasonable result in light of both the way the courts have been heading, for years, regarding executive power, and the way this administration has behaved, in specific.
EDIT: Also I’m a little confused why this is ultimately Pelosi’s fault. The “precedent” you are describing exists nowhere in law, or the constitution. While it’s a “good idea” to have congress have to behave that way, I have no clue how congress is supposed to go about divining appropriate precedent in this matter. Surely you realize that it’s impossible to go through “the exact same process” every time…and there is literally no guidance on what prior acts are good precedent and what are just insignificant details. Two examples:
I think it would also be a good idea not to impeach the president in an election year. We’ve never done that before, does that make the whole thing invalid?
We’ve never impeached the executive for actions that, if true and harmful, would have primarily harmed people outside the country instead of inside the country…is that relevant or not? (It’s worth noting that I considered like 15 potential differences before considering that one. Each impeachment scenario is so different)
A nice example of the misuse of “literally,” with “literally everyone” a strong way of saying “most people.”
Do you think nobody has ever responded to an accusation by confessing? By saying “yes, I did it, but it was self defense/temporary insanity?”
You’re right, by literally I meant “very nearly almost.” Apologies if this offended anyone.
To clarify: It is very very very very very very very very very very common for people targeted by investigations to express the belief that they were wrongfully targeted by said investigation.
Congress always has the power of the purse. That the House didn’t feel the need to exercise it is illuminating.
I’ve been very interested in how a “cutting you off” battle between the house and the presidency would go. My reach is “not well” simply because congress would look mulish as hell…of course, the fact that so much of the public would predictably hold this opinion speaks volumes about public priorities, and vox populi, vox dei after all…
It would go where the people want it to. The reason the House refused to use its power of the purse to coerce witnesses to testify is the same reason it ultimately failed in the Senate: It was unpopular with Americans. And this is despite the House, in this particular instance, having a huge media advantage.
So to be clear: In a future battle of the wills between say, any future president and a house with a yen for investigation, do you think that if the house lacks the political will to exercise the power of the purse to coerce witnesses, the correct inference to draw from that is “this is not a high priority for the public” possibly followed by “let’s move on?”
If those witnesses are subject to executive privilege, particularly regarding foreign policy, I don’t think there is any other sane option.
But, generally, withholding funds should be Congress’s primary weapon. That is the intent of the Constitutional structure as it is set up.
#remindmeinJanuary2023
#also2027-2029-2033-2036-and-2041 under a future Biden, Rubio, Rossino, Occasio-Cortez, and Robo-Biden administration.
Nothing contradictory about favoring cooperation with law enforcement in general but making an exception for investigations launched without any evidence of wrongdoing.
In any case, lawyers generally advise not cooperating, period.
Everyone loves that video…and with good reason, it’s important.
So what I’m asking (and frankly, nailing everyone down on) is this: If future presidents refuse to cooperate, the correct conclusion to draw from that is “well they’re just doing what any normal citizen would do: not giving their legal adversaries an inch, and not cooperating with any investigation until they absolutely MUST”
…must, of course, determined by a court, or the court of public opinion?
Yes.
I’d prefer starting with the courts.
theodidactus, you seem to be demanding one-way virtue here. The Executive must comply with congressional investigations, but you don’t seem to be particularly concerned with holding congress to standards. Should they make any attempts to follow precedents when holding inquiries? Are concerns that they’re merely engaged in political maneuvering rather than investigations of legitimate wrongdoing any cause for concern? If you think they should be concerned with such things and not simply say “House has sole power of impeachment,” what should they do so they can reasonably say to the public and to political opponents, “we’re being fair here?”
I’ll note: I’m not really saying the executive MUST comply with congressional investigations. I’m saying there are two possibly good systems here:
1) Impeachment is a purely political process, subject only to the very minimalistic rules laid out in the constitution. If the executive doesn’t want to comply with an investigation, that’s fine, but then it’s perfectly valid to impeach the executive for not complying (if you can get the votes). It’s also perfectly valid to impeach the executive for gross incompetence (not a crime) or wearing a brown suit at a press conference (as long as you can get the votes).
2) Impeachment is a formalistic process where you move forward based on an elaborate system of rules and procedures. Congress must have a “valid reason” to investigate, and impeachment can be for only, eg, actual crimes as defined by the US criminal code, and so on. The judiciary can oversee and overrule congress (or the executive) on any part of the impeachment process. The president need not comply with an “invalid” act, and congress must go to court, all the way up to the supreme court, if they wish to validly, in the eyes of the electorate, enforce their subpoenas through mechanisms like impeachment.
I prefer 1, you prefer 2. I think I prefer 1 because I want a less activist court that rules based on law and the constitution, not what “feels right” or “seems like a good idea”…but I truly believe, were we starting a country from scratch, we might pick either one and have a good system.
…but we’re not starting a country from scratch. We are instead rapidly approaching the point where we have the absolute worst aspects of both systems. So for example during the impeachment process itself, many republicans hung their vote and made their determination based on having a system like #2 above. Courts should weigh in, high crimes should be specifically criminal. Impeachment should proceed based on “precedent” as defined by some strange mix of policy and what has been done before. Barring that, they just had to vote “no”
…but then the Trump administration marched into court and aggressively argued for a system like #1. Courts, in this paradigm, have no place adjudicating power struggles between the executive and congress (Why did they make this argument? Probably because they knew a court wouldn’t buy their argument based on bare precedent…because they knew they were going up against a relatively conservative court). Whether or not you would “prefer” a system like 2, courts in the united states, particularly and especially conservative judicial appointees are accepting arguments more like 1.
I want to say again, as I said when I initially posed the “President Kunzelnick” hypos, that a system like #2 is fundamentally incompatible with a system where the presidency can readily resist investigations. One cannot meaningfully discuss whether conduct is criminal or blameless, within or outside the scope of a president’s powers, without a very very very large body of facts, which can only be assembled using investigatory powers. The difference between a crime and an innocent act, a smoking gun or an irrelevant detail, is often as simple as who reached for a gun or the tone of voice someone spoke in
Whether we’d prefer a system like #2 or not, the trump administration is arguing for a system more like #1, and importantly they could have (and frankly, would have) made such arguments even if pelosi had scrupulously followed what you imagine to be “important precedent”…their argument (which they made in court before, and after impeachment) is that courts should not get involved in these power struggles. Now what? If you think they need to walk this back, the question is how?
EDIT: Changes for clarity and style and a question at the end.
Reposting in the fresh open thread since I just missed the new one by an hour or so:
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 city?
Dark as a Dungeon- Mining in Appalachian Kentucky: Part 2
Maybe the focus on New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? There were small communities on the coast that were hit harder, but the coverage was mainly about Nola. In terms of numbers, though, I’m not sure that is what you are after.
Have you read Orwell’s Down the Mine? It captures the sheer difficulty of the work and the terrible working conditions–men working in clouds of coal dust wearing only shoes, shorts and kneepads.
I really liked the xkcd from a couple days ago.
The converse of this idea is that when the world comes together and averts disaster, that can be seen as evidence that the problem wasn’t a big deal in the first place. Potential candidates for this: global warming, COVID-19, polio, AI apocalypse, the list goes on.
Democracy, for better or worse, essentially operates on majority opinion, so “let idiots believe what they want, doesn’t change the laws” isn’t a great long-term strategy.
Has Scott or anyone else in this sphere written about this? Any interesting thoughts from you all?
One important point that I think is often overlooked: Make sure that whoever you’re presenting to actually has the power to affect the line somehow.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defeating_prophecy
The Y2K problem is a classic example of this: it actually would have been a huge problem if it had been ignored (albeit significantly less than the absolute catastrophe some were envisioning), and required substantial effort to mitigate, but all the critical stuff got fixed in time, so when the day rolled around the result of the still-unresolved instances of the problem was closer to “several dozen people inconvenienced” than “all the computers stop working”.
It helped that the problem had been on people’s radar for decades by the late 1990s, too: the first major instances of the bug causing real-world issues occurred in January 1970, when newly-issued 30 year loans were entered into accounting computers that used two-decimal-digit dates and promptly noted that there was a payment due in January 1900 that was now 70 years late. It also helped that most software written after maybe the mid-70s had standardized on 32-bit time formats that doesn’t roll over until 2038 (expect to start hearing about problems from UNIX epoch 32-bit rollover bugs in the coming decade), and newer software uses 64-bit formats that should be good for billions of years.
I would not be so sure there won’t be any problem at the end of 2038. There where a couple of reports at the beginning of this year about software failing because the people that fixed the Y2K errors did not anticipate that their software would still be running 20 years later. Stuff like trains not starting because the computer thought it was 2000.
Every year I feel we are moving towards WH40K, were some Tech-Priest managing generations old technology that they neither understand nor could replicate.
The big difference with Y2K is that the people who could fix it were also the people who would be most screwed by it if it weren’t fixed.
One reason why Y2K was containable is that the problem was both well-defined and bounded.
Well-defined in that it was obvious what the problem was. (2-digit date format for years).
Bounded in that it only had to address, potentially, all of the existing computer software and data which stored dates in 2-digit format.
Sure, “all existing computer software” sounds like a lot, but it means that you can audit the existing code-base with high degree of accuracy and enumerate everything which might need to be fixed or replaced (or ignored). Same with importing/migrating data. It also means that you don’t have to worry about eg. the pens in the office suddenly not working.
With a lot of the other issues at hand such as covid-19, climate change, whatever, we’re trying to take action in the face of substantial unknowns where the underlying systems are changing. We have no practical way of enumerating who has or doesn’t have covid-19. Testing everybody still might mean that someone will get the disease between when swabs are taken and the results are returned.
I’ve heard of these referred to as “Wicked problems”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
but the problem is that the term (I think because it sounds cool) has kinda evolved to just mean “hard problem.” I’ve encountered multiple definitions .
Y2K was both a problem that needed to be fixed in some cases, and one that was blown way out of proportion in many more. Yes, there existed certain programs that would crash and kick up all manner of chaos if not patched. However, there also existed vast numbers of programs that would crash but affect nothing else, programs that would not crash, but exhibit errors in hilarious ways that were easily covered for by humans (the world wasn’t nearly as computerized in 2000 as everyone thinks), and programs that were never going to crash at all.
I was working on one of the latter programs, and had to assure management it wouldn’t crash on Jan 1. The fact that it was developed in Java in 1998 – using Date objects that internally relied on milliseconds since epoch, and whose year strings were for display only – wasn’t good enough; we were required to churn out stacks of documentation proving it wouldn’t crash, on a set of inputs they supplied that wouldn’t even apply to what our program did.
We had to divert so many resources to proving it wouldn’t crash that we were unable to move forward on main development. Management then declined to support the program because it didn’t have enough capability, even though it was Y2K-ready.
We weren’t alone. Billions were spent on wasted programmer labor, and no one outside programmer circles at that time remembers.
> Potential candidates for this: global warming, COVID-19, polio, AI apocalypse, the list goes on.
I think the best example is the ozone hole. We now get people unironically saying stuff like “I wonder what ever happened to the whole ozone hole thing. Guess it was just an unfounded panic.”
I have heard that a significant portion was. They didn’t realize at first that it naturally changes size seasonally and made a bunch of wild projections. Not to say that CFCs weren’t an issue, just not as much as predicted.
Interestingly, I just read some literature to refresh myself on it. Seems Dobson discovered it in 1956 and noted the seasonal variability back then. subsequent studies show that the size is also affected substantially by solar cycles. None of this was ever mentioned in anything I’ve read about the Montreal Protocols. Was science journalism ever good?
As a rule, no. Generally the only people who are trained and educated to the point of being able to appropriately interpret scientific studies are scientists themselves.
At best science journalism is a rough transliteration of a press release, that was also itself written by someone who isn’t a scientist, written to jazz up a generally boring paper and justify further funding. At worse, you get howlingly bad interpretations (such as an article about new new 900 milliwatt power-station being built) or a complete inversion of the original research.
My own bias is not just that stuff isn’t important, but that the people worrying about them tend to be extremely annoying and uncool. There’s just something inherently mockable about e.g. putting hand sanitizers in public places ahead of H1N1 (even though that was a good idea). Covid is one of the first times I remember thinking “I wish the government was taking this more seriously”, and it’s made me feel a bit guilty about all the public health officials that gave me the luxury of thinking the ebola response was overblown.
I never really thought about it that way, but I think that pretty accurately sums me up as well.
Hi. I want to read introductory-level nonfiction books, mainly those about the natural sciences and rhetoric.
If, off the top of your head, you can think of books you’d have wished to read in my situation, please mention them.
I already used the lw list.
Highschool is rather slow these days and I want to learn stuff in my free time!
The Origin of Species is a book about a natural science. It is also an example where the author was particularly concerned with rhetoric.
That’s pretty outdated though. The Selfish Gene holds up well and gives you the same gist, but updated information.
But do those memes include any rare Pepes?
In complete seriousness, I can’t wait for the first academically oriented book on Pepe.
Here you go, abstract:
OtOoS is also more rigorous than you necessarily want nowadays.
If it’s the 19th century and people want extraordinary evidence to back up exatraordinary claims, you need to go into exquisite detail on the artificial selection of pigeons etc.
Nowadays, most people don’t need a proof so much as an explanation. Also Darwin didn’t have the Central Dogma and all that.
Blind Watchmaker is good too. Includes a very early exploration of evolutionary algorithms.
Should you read Dawkins before reading Darwin? I did. But it’s definitely no replacement.
To all of these suggestions, I say: read harder books. In between Gardner and Stewart’s stints at Scientific American, was Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas. Before Ryan North’s glib book, there was The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm, by Lewis Dartnell.
American perspective here…
Rhetoric: read Lincoln’s major speeches (both inaugurals, gettysburg, the famous speech he gave to the boarding school, and cooper union), alongside reading Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga by Romm.
Alternate take, a bit less of the all-time best, but more width and breadth, read “Lend Me Your Ears” edited by Safire, and get yourself “The Best Essays of the 20th Century” edited by Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates.
Natural sciences… Isaac Asimov has a bunch of short intro-to books, like “The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation” and “The Lefthand of the Electron”. Not all of it is still totally up-to-date, but Asimov is super readable. +1 to recommending Pinker’s books. Also recommend Richard Feynman.
How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, by Ryan North
The Way Things Work, by David Macaulay
Any Mary Roach book
Here are some nonfiction books that I enjoyed recently:
Oliver Sacks – The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. A lot of psychology books are mostly (dubious) theory. This one is mostly firsthand observation of very strange phenomena: the guy who can’t form new memories, people who are convinced that their own bodies aren’t part of them, and of course the eponymous man who mistook his wife for a hat. The author was a neurologist.
James Mahaffey – Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power. This is a great introduction to the history of nuclear power. There are a lot of interesting things in this. Like, what if they designed a spaceship powered by nuclear bombs? As it turned out, they did (although it was never built.) What if they designed an air-cooled nuclear reactor out of flammable graphite? They did that one too, and actually built it as well (yikes!). At some point I’ll write a long review of this for SSC. For now, I’ll just say… recommended.
John Brooks – Business Adventures. This is a book containing about a dozen business-focused short nonfiction stories, set in the 1950s and 60s. It’s very colorful and definitely worth the read. I’m writing reviews of each chapter for SSC in various open threads. The book itself is available freely online in PDF form.
I love early American history, so I’ve got a long list of my favorites! Here’re some of them, mostly written for general audiences:
* Our First Revolution – a good history of the Glorious Revolution which led to the English Bill of Rights. Not technically American, but in the Anglo-American tradition and a point frequently referenced by the Founding Fathers.
* Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer – Military history of the Revolution in 1776 and early 1777, emphasizing public opinion, the importance of the individual Patriot’s commitment to the cause, and Washington’s leadership
* Founding Brothers, by Joseph Ellis
* America Afire, by Bernard Weisberger – The First Party System, from Washington’s administration through the climactic election of 1800
* The Slave Power / Leonard Richards – Sole book here not for a general audience, this more academic work explores Southern planters’ dominance of the antebellum government and how the Abolitionist movement reacted to it.
* Battle Cry of Freedom / James McPherson – the best one-volume history of the Civil War that I’ve read, incorporating both political and military aspects in a history quite aware of the ethical dimensions of the conflict. Shelby Foote’s old three-volume history also offers a quite comprehensive history of the military aspects, but Foote says little about politics and totally ignores ethics.
* The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge / David McCullough
And also, check out John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government if you’re into abstract political philosophy, or the Federalist Papers if you want it more practical.
Math (not a natural science, imo): Surreal Numbers by Knuth and On Numbers and Games by Conway
Actual science: A Traveller’s Guide to Spacetime by Moore. A bit textbookish. Chaos by Gleick is good, but a bit dated at this point.
If you want to see lots of interesting mathematical ideas, you could do a lot worse than the books which collect Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games columns from Scientific American. There are fifteen such—see here—together with one which is sort of a “best of” (Colossal Book of Mathematics), and the whole collection is available on a CD-ROM, if you can stand that sort of thing.
The books which collect Ian Stewart’s later Mathematical Recreations columns from the same magazine are also quite good.
I’m currently in Europe, which started me thinking about voltage and suicide.
The U.S. has a high rate of gun suicides, presumably because it has a high rate of gun ownership. Europe uses higher voltages than the U.S., so suicide by self-electrocution should be easier. Does Europe have a higher rate of suicide by electrocution?
Or is killing oneself that way so scary that would-be suicides almost always pick other methods?
Is it true that European outlets are more lethal? Not an electricity expert, but I was always told the amperage is the real killer, and Europe and US standards are similar on this (15-16A). But I don’t 100% understand the relationship between voltage and amperage.
I think the formula is voltage equals amperage times resistance. So does this mean a European device has some mechanism in it that offers twice the resistance compared to an American one? Though if this were true, I don’t know how an EU-to-US converter could ever give you anything more than half-power.
Voltage matters because of Ohm’s Law: current (amps) equals electrical potential difference (volts) divided by resistance (ohms). Resistance is roughly constant in similar electrocution scenarios, so roughly doubling the voltage of standard residential electrical supply (110-120V in the US vs 220-240V in Europe) will double the current that actually passes through your body in a given scenario.
That said, resistance varies with circumstances a lot more than voltage varies between countries. In particular, dry skin has something like 500x the resistance of wet skin, so wet vs. dry is about 250x more important to the danger level than 110V vs 220V.
Where the current is happening in your body matters quite a bit, too: an isolated shock on an extremity can hurt quite a bit, and with enough current may cause severe local injury, but is very unlikely to kill you regardless of voltage. But it only takes about 100 mA of AC current flowing through your chest to stop your heart. That’s why if you’re working on potentially-live AC circuits, the standard precautions include several things intended to minimize the risk of forming a current across your heart: wearing shoes with non-conductive soles, only using one hand whenever practical, wearing a glove on at least one hand when you need both hands, and using special hand tools (pliers, screwdrivers, etc) with handles made of non-conductive material.
What I heard was that if you grab a 110V wire with dry hands, you can let go. But if you grab 220V (or 110V with wet hands), the muscle contraction will be so strong you can’t let go. This is probably largely not true — there’s too many variables to skin resistance. But it is at least true that higher voltage means you’re more likely to be unable to let go.
I’ve only gotten bit by 110V (well, and a photoflash probably at roughly 400V, but that was one pulse, and I got blisters under my skin from it), and never had enough of a “grab” to worry about it — if you put your hand around a live electrical outlet and touch both sides, it hurts a LOT but it doesn’t stop you from using the large muscles of your leg to pull yourself away… violently.
Ok, this is weird even for the standards of this blog.
According to Wikipedia, the human skin has a non-linear voltage-current relation, but there resistance is not much different between 100 V and 220 V. If I understand correctly, if you are a healthy adult and the shock occurs though intact skin, you are unlikely to die from a shock from a household power supply, because the various fuses or the circuit breaker will usually trip before you get ventricular fibrillation, though you can’t rely on it.
Faulty and/or improperly disassembled equipment (even battery-powered) that store energy in capacitors or coils can deliver lethal shocks, though I’ve never heard of anybody using them for suicide.
Speaking as a European (which, frankly, is too broad a category to be useful, but whatever), I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a case of suicide by electrocution. Anecdata ain’t data, but taking a bath with a toaster (or such) is something I’ve come across exclusively in American media.
Back in the early Nineties, before all entrances were fitted with electronic locks, the building I lived in seemed to be a fairly popular suicide destination, being twelve stories high with rooftop access. I think I can recall three separate cases of someone leaping to their death, one of which happened just around the time I was coming home from school.
Those were, on the whole, harmless compared to the brainiacs who thought to poison themselves with cooking gas – no doubt reading about it in a book – without taking care to note that the gas being delivered was no longer quite so poisonous (for obvious safety reasons), but was, in fact, quite explosive.
As I recall, the problem there is that older cooking gas was Town Gas, a flammable gas produced as a byproduct of producing coke (a vaguely charcoal-like substance which is the preferred fuel for steel production) from bituminous coal. It’s poisonous because it contains a significant amount of Carbon Monoxide. Modern cooking gas is natural gas (mostly methane, with little or no CO), and while it can asphyxiate you by displacing oxygen, it won’t poison you as such, and it becomes an explosion hazard long before it suffocates you.
> for obvious safety reasons
What part of Europe are you talking about?
Britain switched from town gas (coal + steam = H2, CH4 and a lot of CO) to natural gas (CH4) after they started drilling North Sea oil and gas. I think the switch was as much econonomic as safety-related here.
Poland. After doing a bit of extra research (finding the details turned out to be harder than I thought), it seems that economic factors were in play here (mostly inadequate gas production facilities), too, but safety was also a consideration. The fact that we’d been drilling natural gas since way before WWII certainly helped.
In Warsaw, the switchover ended in 1978.
Methods of suicide tend to be some combination of dramatic, instantaneous, and painless – eg jumping from a height, taking a bunch of pills, hand guns, etc. Death by electrocution is so gruesome, painful, and challenging*, that almost no one would ever do it intentionally. A hundred volts isn’t going to change that.
*: To successfully kill yourself with wall power takes a pretty substantial effort, just “taking a bath with a toaster” is not going to do it most of the time. Thanks, ground fault interruptors!
Unscrew a lightbulb, put your finger in the socket, and get back to us?
Or if you’ll take my word for it, you’ll get a severe shock, and you probably won’t do it again. I have learned to check both wires and use double circuit breakers, my son learned not to unscrew lightbulbs. Otherwise, we’re fine.
220V is usually not enough to kill somebody unless you are really unlucky and have a heart condition or other frailty. You could probably rig something up that would keep voltage running through your heart or brain until it stopped working, but it would likely take a lot of ingenuity, multiple failed and very unpleasant experiments.
88 cases of electrocution, all accidental: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41935-018-0103-5
Half of them died after contact with household current (220V in India), some from low voltages, and some from high voltage train rails/wires.
Here are 3 cases of actual suicides: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10641944
TL;DR: it is possible to kill yourself if you can create a circuit running the current through the heart, but there are probably better ways.
The major difference due to the voltages is that EU electric kettles are literally twice as fast, which makes them much more popular. A few other household gadgets also come in higher power versions by default, but people and workers are quite sufficiently weary of live wires that electrocution is not a thing. Nor is it a popular suicide method, too obviously painful and unreliable.
I don’t know if the number of attempts of self electrocution is higher in Europe than in the US, but I know that the last time I heard of an attempt, the main-fuse in the street blew out, and the person survived with minor injuries.
On the other hand “taking a bath with a hairblower”, or “taking the toaster to the bathroom” used to be common code for suicid.
I think this only works in the movies, somebody dropping a hair dryer in the tub would just short it out, the fuses would blow, and no current would go through the immersed body, since it a) is not part of the circuit and b) is a better electrical insulator than a lot of other immediate objects (the drier, electrical chords, the water, pipes, the tub if of metal, etc)
Guns are tools for killing, and when you have a hammer, all problems look like nails.
And yeah, electricity sounds painful and unreliable as suicide method. People survive electrocution all the time. Fire is widely available too and suicide by fire is p rare…outside of dramatic demonstrations.
Gas explosion suicides seem to happen regularly in my country.
I live in a state where marijuana is not legal but I expect it to become legal here in the next 2-5 years. (My understanding is it is already grown here legally, though I’m not certain.) Let’s say I have $1000 to invest right now in some aspect of the marijuana industry in my state. What should I do with it so that in 10 years hence I’ll get the greatest return with the least amount of effort?
Put it in a mutual fund and forget about the marijuana industry? It seems that there is more money being lost in the legal weed game than being made right now.
Don’t be the prospector, be Levi Strauss.
Find a black market dealer and see if they need an investor? There seems to be evidence that black market sales will still out-compete legal weed because of tax/regulation avoidance. Plus the majority of consumers are already comfortable using black market dealers, why change up for a product that likely isn’t any better and costs more?
You might get all your profits eaten by the cost of kneecap surgery.
Or bail.
Are legit marijuana businesses still having trouble getting banking services thanks to hassling by the feds?
Yeah, dispensaries are still cash-only, even in legal states. Weed is still federally illegal, so banks (whose regulators all happen to be feds) won’t touch it with a 10-ft. pole.
NBC News is reporting that in a closed-door briefing with Senate staff, the Congress and the Supreme Court’s attending physician is saying they expect 70-150 million people in the US to be infected. And in the public briefing to Congress, Anthony Fauci from the NIH is sticking to the estimate of roughly 1% mortality for the infected.
I am wondering how long folks will be sticking to the idea that people are overreacting.
What are the best estimates of the number of people in the US who get seasonal flu in a typical range of flu seasons? (Yes, I know this is lower than we would expect for COVID19 because of flu vaccination. OTOH it’s at most 2x lower since the flu vaccine is not that effective, AIUI.)
The CDC estimates that in the past decade the annual number of cases ranged from 9.3 to 45 million. Pruning the highest and lowest, 21-36.
Top-level comment elsewhere in the OT:
“Seemingly-healthy people, go to a hospital to get treated for Coronavirus! By the time you have a symptom, the lung is usually 50% Fibrosis and you die!” Does seem like overreacting.
What priors is the Congress and the Supreme Court’s attending physician plugging into the numbers they crunched to get 21.4-46% of the population will be infected? Is the high number under the assumption that the federal, state, and local governments do nothing and the lower that they start doing ???
We don’t want to get into Fallacy of the Excluded Grand Canyon where no people are overreacting because “folks” are underreacting. (Spellcheck thinks Coronavirus and underreacting aren’t real words. Hrm.)
FWIW, I emailed the boss of the guy who sent me that message. I wouldn’t mind if he gets fired.
>I am wondering how long folks will be sticking to the idea that people are overreacting.
Well I think the main thing is that people are stockpiling as if this is just something they’ll need to wait out for a couple weeks. But I think we’re past the point of containing it. And it’s not like it’s going to spread to 70 million people overnight. That’s going to take several months, it’s not really something we can all sit home and wait out for. It’ll still be useful to slow down the spread for various reasons. But normal healthy people under the age of 50 should probably continue going about their lives for the most part. I think there’s more danger in supply chain issues if healthy working age adults stop being able to work, ala factory closings in Wuhan. Though I could be wrong about that as the numbers out of China seem to indicate the extreme measures might work. But whether they can really keep that up long enough to drop the R0 rate below 2 will be the interesting question I suppose.
Stocking up 2 weeks serves 2 purposes:
1. Those who are sick have supplies they can use while remaining home and not trying to get more and infect others
2. Those not sick when the virus hits their area are not affected by the inevitable rush on grocery stores.
3. Those that are not sick, don’t have to put themself and people in their household in danger, when they visit the grocery store once or more a week.
70-150 million is about the number of people we would expect to be infected if we did nothing. People, and state and local governments, and businesses, are doing a fair bit of stuff to try and minimize infection. If the expected result of that is the same as if we did nothing, then maybe they are overreacting?
I think it is more likely that Congress’s attending physician is overpredicting and that private and public action will reduce the count to rather less than 70 million infected / 700k dead.
I actually largely agree with this, but it’s sort of a Catch-22, isn’t it? The general position I am seeing a lot of and classifying as the “everyone is overreacting” position is something like, “Shutting everything down like this and staying home for a month is a huge overreaction! It’s going to crash the economy for no good reason!”
Saying that the death rate will be low if we shut everything down doesn’t seem like a great argument for that position.
(Not that you are arguing for that position here, but it is the one I was reacting to in the first post.)
For me, I have a few concerns.
I don’t just think people are overreacting, I think the are reacting badly, in ways that ultimately won’t actually help that much long term but will cause significant (unnecessary) damage in other areas. I do think some action is warranted, this isn’t a case of “much ado about nothing”, it is a case of “too much wrong stuff ado about something”.
My second concern is looking to the future. No matter what happens, nobody is ever going to admit that anything we have done or will do was unnecessary. If it turns out not to be as bad as some have predicted, it will be taken as inherent truth that everything we did was 100% necessary and is the only reason things weren’t as bad (even if there is strong evidence later that it wouldn’t have been as bad without some of the more extreme actions). Why is this bad? We get new disease outbreaks seemingly every handful of years. Expect the current reaction to be the new normal, if anything expect stronger reactions in the future. If we’re going to go down that road we probably needed to start designing our entire country, infrastructure, and economy around shutting down for several months every few years yesterday…not sure how long it would take us to actually be able to make that work but it isn’t now and it won’t be in time for the next health scare.
Maybe there needs to be some sort of rhetorical fallacy or term for what’s been happening.
With a problem of this import and magnitude, you are *totally justified* in getting upset if someone underestimates the magnitude of the problem. You’re also *totally justified* if someone overestimates it.
This means you can rhetorically attack anyone that does not precisely estimate the danger involved.
For the record, how many deaths would the current level of action need to prevent for it to be justified in your eyes?
ETA: The NBA just had a player test positive for COVID and immediately canceled the game in which he was about to play. Appropriate response? They’ve also suspended the rest of the season. Appropriate response?
Cancelling the season? Really? (That’s rhetorical, because I just checked. Wow.)
Is it uneconomical to play games in empty stadiums? If people are stuck at home, give them some sports to watch, even if the stands are empty. Watching a sports game on TV is the ultimate social distancing.
@Edward Scizorhands-
They suspended the season. The game itself got “canceled” in so far as they didn’t play the game and kicked everyone out of the arena. If the season resumes, they’ll presumably play the game at some point.
Thread on /r/nba.
@matthewravery
Hard to say. I feel like I recall seeing something posted (I assume here, because I don’t know where else I would have come across it) about being able to attribute x deaths for every y% drop in GDP, so that would probably be a good place to start for a baseline. I don’t think what we’re doing is saving very many lives at all.
@Edward Scizorhands
As someone else noted, the season is suspended. One of the players tested positive, so there is concern that some or many other players/coaches may also be infected. This is the right call, 100%. If they determine that other people in the league were not infected, they should start up again in a few weeks. If a lot of people are infected, they should resume play once those people have recovered and are no longer contagious. If they end up just cancelling the season no matter what (which I think is a strong possibility) that would be a mistake.
When I read this about what Rudy Golbert did https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fh8ee6/the_nba_has_suspended_its_season/fk9l9sz/
okay, yeah, suspending the season until they can get players tested is the right thing. Anyone infected sits out.
There is an argument that we can’t do much about how many people will be infected total, but everything that governments and businesses do helps spread out those infections to a longer timespan, because if everyone is infected simultaneously that causes more problems. I’m not sure I believe this, it’s the position that David Madore holds. I guess the truth depends on how much this virus can survive during the summer, and we can’t answer that yet.
Given that Iran doesn’t appear to be doing great, I don’t know how much we should be banking on that.
Iran is not a hot country at this time of the year. The temperature in Tehran is about 20°C right now. Iran is on a plateau and therefore significantly colder than you might expect given its latitude. They have snow in winter.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Assuming that the death rate goes up a lot if the number of people who need hospital care is greater than the number of people who can be cared for in hospitals, just getting the max number of people sick at one time down–even if the total doesn’t change at all–will be likely to help.
One of my vivid memories is of a severe flu outbreak when I was in my teens. Usually, there were enough people well to get help with chores if you were really sick–but so many people were sick that there weren’t people able to help. I remember trying to carry feed and water to the cows while feverish enough that I couldn’t remember where I was or what I was doing consistently.
Wow. Do you remember when that outbreak was? I’ve heard bad things about the 1958 Asian Flu, but nothing between then and the H1N1.
By my age, late 1980’s or very early 1990’s.
I doubt it was severe at a national level – just in my specific community. It both spread faster and people were more severely ill than was typical, but was “just flu.”
I think we’re already in stage four. I think we were in stage four since the beginning of the outbreak, given how contemporary society is globalized.
So first, I agree with John Schilling that the 70-150 million number seems predicated on absolutely zero action, declaring “National High Five Day,” what have you. We are obviously doing something. Telling people “there is a contagious new virus, it is sort of like the flu except more virulent, for the love of God wash your hands, no more handshakes, and don’t stand near people if you can help it” should presumably accomplish some reduction. If it doesn’t, then there’s a lot of very bad advice being given out.
Personally, I suspect that better hygiene practices would actually get you the majority of the benefit, and the rest of the stuff is working to help at the margins. But I have no data on that and I certainly won’t insist on it.
But at some point, if we’re dealing with “flu, but significantly more virulent,” well, we have a model of how to deal with flu. It’s basically “get a flu shot, otherwise nothing unusual,” and over 20,000 people died this year alone. I don’t bet on things like this, but if I did my bet would be that fewer people die of coronavirus than have died during this flu season. That’s still a lot! That’s thousands / tens of thousands! But if so, it is still in the ballpark of a really bad flu season overall (flu + coronavirus). We don’t usually shut the country down for that. Again, I have no data on this guess. I’m just putting it out there as my gut prediction. The main point is that the flu sets a marker – for flu-level problems, you don’t tank the economy. I think that’s pretty clear from our past actions. For greater threats, maybe you do. So let’s look at that.
Let’s take the upper range of the “do nothing, infects 150 million” estimate given above, with its 1% mortality. That’s 1.5 million dead. That’s a ton. That’s ten times worse than the worst flu season we’ve had in the last few decades, IIRC. So that really is awful to contemplate. That being said, let’s assume the following postulates: (1) costless measures like “wash your hands” campaigns do literally nothing – they prevent zero deaths; (2) a complete shutdown of the economy for a month will completely stop the epidemic; (3) said complete shutdown is the only way to save 1.5 million lives; (4) during “complete shutdown” the economy actually works at 1/2 capacity (working from home, essential personnel, etc.). U.S. GDP is something like $22 trillion. Losing 1/2 of one month of that production would be 1/24th of that, say $900 billion lost. That comes out to a cost of $600,000 per life saved, with the caveat that most of those lives will be elderly / frail / sick people – e.g. the sad case of the nursing home residents in Washington. By my calculation, with the over-65s at about 1/7th of the population, they would account for something like 70-80% of the total fatalities (20 million infected, say 6% death rate, with the other 120 million healthy at a .2% death rate). Let’s say that the average person whose life is lost loses, say, 10 years of life expectancy (I’d guess it would be closer to five given that age mix).
The U.K.’s NICE board calculates prices they will pay for treatment based on Quality-Adjusted Life Years, QALYs. The current going rate for approval that I Googled is, I believe, about $40,000 (30,000 pounds) per QALY. Based on our back-of-envelope figures above, that intervention even to prevent the worst-case scenario would cost about $60,000 per QALY. The NICE probably wouldn’t approve it. If my (admittedly unsupported) estimate of a flu-level event – 20,000 dead – is correct, it would be $45 million per life, $4.5 million per QALY. The EPA statistical value of a life (not adjusting for age or QALY) is about $7.4 million. You need to project 120,000 saved by these non-costless measures alone (i.e. if handwashing gets you halfway there, the numbers have to double) just to get into striking distance of the EPA value of a life. You need to have over 2 million saved to get into NICE QALY territory. And again, the baseline in our country for 20,000 – 60,000 dead from regular flu season is more or less “do nothing extraordinary.”
I’m not saying these numbers are perfect, but I don’t think they’re hugely off. I’ve seen multiple investment analyst estimates suggesting a loss of several percent of GDP, and the life / QALY values are all based in real world numbers. The lives saved are total speculation by just about everyone, and we used the highest end of the scale. So when you say “over-reaction”… I’m not saying my numbers are definitely right, but I hope someone somewhere is running these same, or similar numbers with real-world values. Someone should think about these numbers, and it’s not going to be the general public, who (justifiably) mostly care about their loved ones and say things like “If it saves just one life…” non-ironically. It is totally possible to over-react, and I think we are doing it on a significant scale. But my opinion isn’t important; the point is that authorities should balance these concerns, and if anyone says “something else needs to be done!” then the burden should be on them to specify exactly what, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how much marginal benefit we expect from exactly X, Y, or Z intervention they suggest.
I agree with your general premise of “It is technically possible to overreact”, but your numbers are hugely off because they ignore the effects on the health care system and you dramatically over-estimate the economic cost of shutting down the NBA and doing college remotely.
1% mortality is probably right if we can give proper healthcare to the people that need it. We have about 100,000 ICU beds in the country. Occupancy rates were around 66% back in 2010. So that leaves around 35,000 unoccupied at any given time. If our hospitals get hit with the full brunt all at once, mortality will spike, and you’ll also see folks die from things that aren’t COVID at higher rates for lack of care.
This also ignores the losses from all the folks that are sick. If 1.5 million die, then you’ve probably got 15 million who are very sick and require care, either from a medical professional (except they’re all way too busy now) or a spouse or loved one. So you still have folks that aren’t going into work because now they’ve got to care for Grandma.
I also think you’re pessimistic about the economy. Large parts of the economy won’t be effected. The Airlines and hospitality industry will be hit extremely hard, and the food services industry will be hit as well, though probably not as bad. Rounding that up to half of GDP for a month seems absurd to me. The government will continue to pay out 100%, and most office jobs will move to telework. On top of that, for every dollar folks aren’t spending that month, they’ll spend $0.90 (or something like that) in subsequent months. Or they’re spending it today on toilet paper.
Anyhow, I think the problem we’re facing now is that we under-reacted for the past month. So now when major steps start happening at once, folks are left a little stunned. If you haven’t been following this closely, suddenly having all sports and concerts canceled does seem a bit dramatic.
I think this amounts to whipsawing the issue. I’m not ignoring the health care system burden, and my point is that “canceling NBA games and doing remote college” is either (a) not significant, in which case why is it being touted as a panacea?, or (b) it’s a lot more than that which is being requested, in which case the costs are much higher. The numbers I was using were taken directly from the “worst case scenario” top post. I am no epidemiologist, so I’m not saying they’re right or wrong, but I think death rates is one of the most obvious fudge factors here. You’re arbitrarily saying they’ll be higher than the worst case scenario Fauci outlines; you can do that practically indefinitely until it becomes a minor Pascal’s Mugging. Moreover, there’s a common “double-counting” that happens where the number of cases is said to be arbitrarily higher than confirmed cases (usually 20-100 times greater) thus justifying the mass measures (because the horse is out of the barn) but then the death rate is calculated using only confirmed cases. It’s hard to hide deaths. If there is a pool of 50x the confirmed thousand cases, but we’re only seeing less than fifty deaths, then it suggests overall mortality cannot be as great as indicated. Or if there really are so few cases, then the mortality is very troubling but we should still be using more focused measures.
As for the economics, I postulated a shutdown of almost all jobs, not just NBA and college. If that’s not what’s being recommended, OK, but then what else is there to do? And it’s still not accounting for the benefit brought by simple, costless measures like hand-washing and social distancing. Also, if you literally shut things down, then you are foregoing production. You can “make up” spending but you can’t “make up” production unless there is a bunch of slack in your production system. If my factory runs at a max capacity of 100 widgets per day, and I shut down for ten days, then I will make 1,000 fewer widgets that year.
I think a lot of this is typical-minding from folks like me who sit at a desk, can post half-formed thoughts on the Internet, and probably can work from home without a huge loss in capacity. But that’s a small part of the economy, and especially the “essential” economy that deals in real live goods-and-services that society needs to survive. If all lawyers stop working for a month, nobody dies. If all truck drivers stop working for a month, or all hazmat cleanup crews, or all retail stockers, or all logistics supply personnel, then we’re really in trouble. Jeff Bezos is probably working from home; I bet you dollars to doughnuts that his warehouse workers aren’t. If they’re shut down, then it won’t be long before economic output takes a real big hit.
They’re plausibly worst case when heath care is working, but I don’t think they’re the worst possible case if health care collapses under the load. And Italy’s example shows that that is a realistic risk.
Also, your economic numbers likely overestimate the cost of setting up significant restrictions to limit the spread of disease, and 100% certainly seriously underestimate the cost of doing nothing. You’re assuming that if nobody worries about the virus and keeps behaving like before, this strategy ensures the virus will have no effect on the economy whatsoever. But a portion of the workforce getting sick will have serious effects even if they don’t ultimately die, and international effects alone will have economic consequences whatever a single country does.
I work in a restaurant kitchen and two of my three roommates are bartenders. I don’t think it makes any sense to call social distancing “costless.”
If shutting down the economy for a month costs us $900 billion, we should consider alternative remediation.
Like, what would it cost to isolate the vulnerable population? Have their only interaction be with people who are checked daily and themselves take social distancing steps.
It looks like there are around 80 million people above age 55, give or take. That gives us a budget of about $10,000 per person. That seems plenty.
Do “deep” audio speakers produce better sound than “flat” audio speakers?
Have there been any scientific studies into this, including tests where listeners had to rate the audio quality of a speaker without knowing its design?
Deep: https://www.crutchfield.com/p_107TSI100B/Polk-Audio-TSi100-Black.html
Flat: https://www.crutchfield.com/S-rNdi3gZMrqr/p_991T301B/KEF-T301-Black.html
Like, they’ll have focus groups and Brüel & Kjaer mics and fourier transforms, oh the endless fourier transforms! And helmholz equations and numerical solvers and hordes of once-optimistic R&D engineers, their eyes long dull and matplotlib heatmaps and impedance curves.
At least what they’re doing is linear the lucky sods.
Tl;Dr: it’s not like people buy bulky speakers for no reason. But a decent speaker company will have spent a buttload of money making their flat speakers as good as possible. I’d naively expect flat speakers to not be great in the bass range. There will probably be some aqudiophile forum where everyone is bald and has a goatee where they explain the tradoffs.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140010561.pdf
Ok, they probably actually make their heatmaps with COMSOL. Do you even need multiphysics? There only seems to be one Physics going on: sound waves. Find a dedicated Helmholz solver.
(Normal service will be resumed shortly, when I get my accoustics diss handed in.)
Flat speakers are in fact notorious for having relatively little bass, but this is easily fixed by adding a subwoofer. I have enjoyed the “boxless” sound of my KEFs and Magnepans over the years, and compared them favorably to the Triangle, Klipsch, and B&W “deep” speakers I’ve had, but I recognize that this is not in any sense a scientifically informed opinion.
What satire you are aware of that caused prolonged and substantial change in its satirized material?
That is, the satire was effective enough to cause a change of behavior possibly to the point where the satire no longer applied.
Do NOT include satire that simply became popular or more popular than what it was parodying.
Also try not to include rebranding.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. British seem to be the masters of the craft, but Loadsamoney’s creator Harry Enfield, complained about how most people thought his character was endearing rather than deplorable, and as noteworthy Johnathan Swift was, he was never able to get rid of their Irish baby eating problem.
At first I was going to ask for examples of satire that turned around and became/promoted what they were satirizing, but I found it a lot easier to find examples of that than the reverse.
The most well known example I’ve thought of is that of Mary Sue – please disregard its current vague/widely applied usage.
Originally it was parodying a rather niche style in a rather niche field – self-insert romantic fanfiction. And from what I am aware, even before it become widespread to the broader public, quite a few writers tried avoiding to write Mary Sues after the term came about (with varying success – which is partially how we know it was being avoided).
Relevant podcast by Malcolm Gladwell: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox
(No, there’s nothing in there about needing to parody something for at least 10,000 hours before it sticks.)
If you’ll excuse something from vague memory, I think the abolition of dueling had a lot do with it being portrayed as ridiculous.
There were a lot of big-budget disaster movies in the ’70s, in particular the Airport series, and then Airplane! made the genre look so ridiculous that it never recovered. (They still make a new one every so often, but I can’t remember the last one to be much of a hit.) It also remade Leslie Nielsen from a character actor in dramas to a star of absurdist comedies.
The internet tells me that TGI Friday’s got rid of “pieces of flair” because of Office Space.
I immediately thought of the affair Sweden had with a marginal income tax rate of 102%, because it had been called out in an essay by the author of the popular Pippi Longstocking books. However, it seems the tax rate was 102% only if you squint a certain way. Still, it did contribute to Sweden’s Social Democrat Party being voted out for the first time in 44 years.
This Hour has 22 Minutes (a famous Canadian satirical news show) had a skit about how the Canadian navy had no submarines, while even West Edmonton Mall had a submarine. Did this impact the Canadian navy soon after buying submarines from the UK?
Jon Stewart made fun of Crossfire and Tucker Carlson, and it was soon cancelled with the producer saying it was because he thought Jon had made good points (if I remember correctly). Although Jon’s jokes / insults to Tucker weren’t really satirical.
So, I returned to a small city that I lived in 14 years ago this weekend, and was shocked by the massive number of homeless & street people that weren’t there before. This is in a rural state that’s way outside of the huge coastal city beltway, and also I live in a Tier 1 US city and so thought I was pretty inured to homelessness by this point. So, a question and a comment:
Question: Is there good literature on anything that actually ‘cures’ homelessness, especially for the long-term ones? I have to admit I’m quite skeptical, they seem to lack the basic skills to function on any level of society, so I don’t see how just giving them a free home, medical care, drug care etc. would ‘fix’ them. Is there anything empirically proven to work?
Comment: No matter where you live, fight with everything you’ve got against your city installing a homeless shelter, halfway house, treatment clinic, resource shelter- anything that would bring street people. Rage against the do-gooders and do literally anything possible- chain yourself to the building if you have to. (I suppose if you’re a renter you can just move, so it’s less dramatic). This small rural city had a shelter/treatment center downtown 14 years ago, and there were always half a dozen characters loitering around, but it was basically a Normal City. Now I saw a small army of 30 aggressive street people hanging around in front, plus dozens and dozens and dozens scattered throughout the city, wandering around, aggressively panhandling, passed out, etc. It was frankly shocking- it looked like Mad Max had taken over this quaint small city. And again, I’m a veteran big city dweller and don’t blink twice at ‘normal’ homelessness. They are all drawn by the shelter/center. I spent the weekend discussing the issue with everyone I found there.
And of course once the shelter’s there, the do gooders will fight twice as hard to prevent removing it. I can see an argument for locating shelters in industrial centers where no one goes, but dear Lord, don’t allow one in your city. I’d rather place one in a rural area and be willing to pay for 3 buses a day back and forth (with the driver safely behind a fence, like a prison bus). Vastly cheaper to pay for the bus than the loss of property values, business revenue, policing & jail costs, loss of tourist revenue, etc.
strikes me as a very dramatic and somewhat unethical? stance. I understand the drop in comfort, perceived safety, and other QOL issues that such a shelter can bring in, but the fact of the matter is homeless people exist whether or not the shelter does, not building one simply makes them suffer somewhere else, where you can’t see them. At least a shelter improve their lives in measurable and objective ways: food, beds, and health care to name a few. To fight against granting these significant benefits to people is unusual.
It shouldn’t be considered unethical to fight against giving people things at the cost of your own quality of life.
Depends on your ethics.
Note that in Christianity, which likely invented the principle “do good to those that hurt you”, lowering your quality of life to help people who won’t return the favor is considered supererogatory.
Inventing ethics that tells everyone who doesn’t hurt themselves for a marginal increase in the QOL of society’s least functional people “you’re completely unethical!” seems like risky business for the whole society.
NIMBY isn’t universalizable – if everyone says “homeless shelters are good, but not in my backyard” the result is that no homeless shelters can be built anywhere, regardless of how good they are.
Inventing ethics that say “If something that benefits society will require anyone anywhere to sacrifice quality of life, it should not be done” sounds just as bad, TBH.
But if the sacrifice is bigger than the benefit, then it doesn’t seem at all wrong to say that thing shouldn’t be done.
I think there may be a distinction between “this is bad for me but good the homeless so I do it anyway” and “this is bad for me and bad for my neighbors but good for the homeless so I do it anyway.”
How about if you spend your resources campaigning for a big homeless shelter to be built in some other town instead?
Do you have a family, kids? Female partner? I invite you to bring them to the Thunderdome-style location I was at over the weekend and walk around. I’ll even give you the address. It was like visiting a slum in a 3rd world country (though, extremely white). Then imagine that mob of street people moving in, say, next door.
There’s nothing wrong with taking care of your family before others. Even if you live alone, I would bet an extremely large sum of money that you’d move and/or sell your condo at a fire sale price if this group showed up in your neighborhood say next week. Also, I specifically list alternate locations for homeless shelters going forward, such as industrial areas or rural areas with bus service.
Personally I would be fine with shelters if a) folks didn’t hang out in huge mobs outside, and b) it didn’t attract homeless who otherwise wouldn’t be there
Apologies, rereading your post i do see you would be fine with shelters in less viable or rural areas. I was more surprised by the visceral opposition to shelters in general the first time around i read this that the minor reference to this escaped me. To clarify my position, i understand what you mean and yeah, if it really is that bad that the average/total utility of the normal citizens living there is brought down more than the benefit it brings to the homeless, i would agree it’s unethical. My response was more that you seemed to be extremely and strongly against homeless shelters in their entirety, not just in this specific case, which doesn’t mesh with my experience where my (admittedly larger) city has a few homeless shelters downtown and our visible homeless populations is extremely low. Specifically the reference to people who advocated for the shelter as “do gooders” was really unusual. I’m wondering if perhaps there are some extenuating circumstances in your town that’s caused this behavior.
It’s not my town, was just visiting, but having lived there a while ago the difference was really shocking.
Perhaps homeless shelters can exist in huge cities without changing the look, though in the Tier 1 US city I live in now the two sketchy parts of town are centered around the two shelters. I think what you’re not factoring in is in placing a shelter in the middle of a smaller town, you’re not just servicing the local homeless population, but attracting a large number who wouldn’t otherwise be there. My issue is not with homeless, but homeless in vast quantities.
I feel like whatever we owe the homeless doesn’t extend to allowing our neighborhoods to be taken over by open drug usage, scattered syringes, open defecation, petty crime, break-ins, hassling women walking through an area, etc. If you feel so sympathetic to them, why stop at a shelter- why not invite them into your home?
@hash872
I guess to get to what i view as the Motte part of your post; i agree. A small town like this, where the influx of homeless residents causes a significant decrease in quality of life for the residents, isn’t good. And absolutely, having open drug usage, scattered syringes, open defecation, petty crime, break-ins, etc isn’t something you owe the homeless in exchange for a shelter. That’s unreasonable, even as a utilitarian. I suppose the key point it comes down to is that a shelter should be constructed if the resulting influx can be handled by the city and infrastructure. In a smaller town where the population is small enough the influx can account for a substantial chunk of the pop, it’s not feasible to construct a shelter because of the reasons you described. But in larger cities, where these extra costs can be easily absorbed by the nature that they’re small relative to the total population, it makes sense to have shelters.
Do you think that there are zero homeless people who respond to incentives?
By respond to incentives, do you mean “becomes homeless” or “move to this area to improve their lives”? Assuming the latter, of course they would do that, it’s rational. But denying shelters in their entirety (which i now understand hash was not doing, it was just rather strongly worded), strikes me as throwing a blanket over pits of suffering.
Seams easier to just hire someone like Will Teasle to be your sheriff after building whatever homeless facilities your area wishes.
@hash872 says:
Same thing for Berkeley and Oakland 1975 to 1990, and damn near everywhere in the San Francisco bay area (except fir the island City of Alameda which somehow seems spared) from 2005 to now.
They started “de-institutionalization” (kicking folks out of the state mental hospitals) in the late ’60’s (the “plan” was for them to go to local ‘mental health clinics’ instead), but as I remember it (as a teenager) the numbers of street beggars most dramatically increased during the early ’80’s recession and “crack” epidemic (I don’t remember homeless shelters existing during those years of increasing beggars, those came later), the visibly homeless decreased a little bit in the late ’90’s, but never went back below the levels of the ’70’s (and according to my grandparents and parents there were no visibly homeless after the start of WW2 until the ’70’s).
The next big increase in visible homelessness I saw was in 2009, but 2012 on was even more dramatic (so the recession was bad, but the recovery was worse).
As far as I can tell increased visible homelessness correlates with
1) Drug addiction
2) Job losses
3) Rent increases.
Frankly I’m pro ’30’s style “make work” programs, ’50’s style public housing (but not towers), involuntary confinement of schizophrenic street screamers, and of re-starting the drug war (though the last is also because I’m tired of the common smell of marijuana and the sight of discarded hypodermic needles).
A tent city has recently popped up right by the Webster Tube, so Alameda is no longer an outlier. Also, they are building a homeless outpatient shelter in town, so I expect the situation to get significantly worse.
@JayT,
Well that’s distressing, I had taken my wife shopping and my son to playgrounds in “the city that time forgot” this last year and was impressed, all good things must come to end I suppose.
Alameda has some homeless people, but it’s only a “problem” by the standards of the 1980s (unless that tent city is bigger than I remember). We have some people living in vehicles, but they seem to be mostly in functional vehicles, which indicates they have at least some of their shit together, which is a step above the vehicle-dwellers in San Francisco.
There was an Oakland-style tent city that popped up pretty much overnight a few weeks ago. Then they shooed them all away last week, but there are already five or six tents back.
Plumber, you bring this up frequently and I’d advise you to revise your rhetoric, because people keep thinking you want to pay one guy to dig a hole and another guy to fill it in, when what I think you (and I) want is infrastructure. Build bridges, dams, roads. This may be “make work,” but it’s useful work.
Infrastructure program dollars in the US have a habit of disappearing into the gullets of contractors with not much to show for it. I also question whether modern bridges, dams, and roads can be built safely with the kind of labor quality we are talking about.
Sorry, but I’m skeptical. Is this infrastructure that we would be building otherwise? If not, why are we building it at all? How much is that infrastructure going to cost us decades down the line?
Our bridges and dams are falling apart as is, so I would like them fixed, and we have (or had) people who need jobs, so it sounds like a two birds, one stone situation.
I hiked with my two older kids in a regional park last weekend, and, at the top of one of the hills, came across a picnic shelter that was clearly a CCC/WPA era construction. We stopped and started a fire and loitered awhile before moving on. There different sorts of useful.
Honest question: How many of the people who need jobs are capable of doing skilled construction/engineering work?
The days when construction work involving stacking up stones and banging things with hammers is long gone. I don’t have any personal knowledge of the industry, but just from watching construction sites, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of training involved.
@Conrad Honcho
My understanding is we’ve overbuilt, though. So yes, there are old things we want to repair or replace, but on net we should be doing less building, not more.
JonathanD’s family is enjoying stuff built that way about 80 years later. So…oh no, if we do it the old fashioned way we only get at least 80 years out of it instead of 150 years or something? This seems like letting perfect be the enemy of good.
There’s a pretty huge difference between building bridges and building picnic shelters. One is (ostensibly) useful, the other is definitely make work.
I also through my vote to “the people that need work are largely not able to do construction work”, because if they were, they wouldn’t need work. Construction worker unemployment has been below the country’s average.
The answer could be “no we wouldn’t, but we probably should.”
If we were as competent as Eisenhower-era Americans, we could build highways to relieve the overcrowded ones built in the 1950s. But apparently we’re incompetent and carrying a high parasite load of Cost Disease.
Because it’s useful?
Where I live, construction is overwhelmingly done by guys with little education who came to the US without overmuch concern for legalities involving border controls and mostly don’t speak English. I don’t think this requires a ton of training, though it does require being a functional person who can be relied upon to show up on time to work and to do your job.
@Loriot says:“Honest question: How many of the people who need jobs are capable of doing skilled construction/engineering work?…”
Honest answer: not many of those now marginally employed, but others more gainfully employed move up into those positions, and then the jobs they vacated become open.
I’m projected from my own experience of working retail for small pay when I was in my 20’s until the tight labor market of the late ’90’s created openings in construction work for me.
The historic W.P.A. did more than construction projects though (the really big projects were a separate agency, the P.W.A. which was less focused on how many could be employed just to be employed, and the death rates from accidents show that), besides famous/infamous murals there were circus performances for children, guidebooks written, plays (with very large casts!), archaeological digs, interviews with former civil war soldiers and slaves – it really was an “employer of last resort”, and they tried to make the jobs not feel like ‘bullshit’ ones because the point was dignity – these were already people on “relief” (what welfare assistance was called then).
Also many of those who are actively threatened by unemployment at the moment are miners, steal workers, oil workers, farm workers, and harbor men.
I would be surprised if those couldn’t be taught to use the kind of machinery used on construction sites.
Edit: Repaired the blockquote
When I used to teach experimental spectroscopy, one of the neat tidbits that went with the lab exercise was that the standard references for what elements had what emission lines and how relatively bright, came out of a WPA project to pay unemployed scientists to sit in front of a spectrometer and measure everything in sight. That was in one sense busywork – basically nobody in 1930 had any real need for the emission spectrum of selenium – but it’s real data that we were going to need eventually, and I’m glad we paid unemployed scientists to do it then rather than paying them to sit at home on the dole.
@Plumber
Look, man, there just aren’t as many people needed on a jobsite as we did in the ’30s. Most of the people on the big projects at the time were laborers. They were there to pick up heavy things, move them to a different place, and put them down. My agency has plenty of pictures of the construction of Bonneville Dam, and there are a lot of wheelbarrows in use. Nowadays we use heavy equipment to fill dump trucks, using far fewer people for far higher production rates.
Further, you absolutely wouldn’t want to recreate these jobsites: you would literally go to jail if you did. A favorite picture we have posted on the walls of our office can be found here, of construction workers with a turbine runner in Bonneville Powerhouse 1 in 1937. @Plumber knows construction sites, so I’m going to talk to the rest of you who don’t: Everything in this picture is fucking absurd. It is wrong in every direction at the same time.
To orient you to the site, let’s look at the floor where the three guys on the furthest left bottom are standing: that is the floor of the generator hall at Elevation +55.0′ (El. 16.8m). The drop you see in front of them leads down to the turbine pit, then down to the draft tube which bottoms out at El. -34.0′ (El. -10.4m). In case you didn’t notice, those are positive and negative signs, indicating that the first is fifty-five feet (or sixteen and eight-tenths meters) above sea level, and the bottom of the pit they are over is thirty-four feet (or ten and four-tenths meters) below sea level. You see a picture of 51 people riding the load* over a drop of 89 feet (27.1m). I repeat: there are 51 people riding a load over a drop of 9 stories, without a single one of these individuals tied off, for a fucking photo opportunity.
If this picture happened today, the C-suite of the Contractor would fire the entire project management team of the project, and if they didn’t, the Government would terminate their contract for default**. @Plumber, you cannot wishcast the PWA back into existence, and you wouldn’t like it if it did come back. Can you honestly say that as bad as any of your employers were that they were this cavalier with your life? I remind you that this wasn’t some developer hammering on contractors to get an apartment building done so he can start collecting rent, the Owner here was the US Government. I’ve seen even more cavalier attitudes towards safety in other Corps Projects built in the early 20th century (the old derrick for placing upstream stoplogs at Ballard Locks in Seattle is particularly absurd), so this wasn’t just “evil capitalists,” just the entire society not valuing safety.
*Edit: I forgot to mention that these guys are riding the load–on top of something being moved by a crane–which is absolutely forbidden today for safety reasons.
**Second Edit: I’ve not seem names and job titles for the subjects of this photo, but the odds are good that the Government both approved of this photo and has some of its representatives in it–I mean, we have it posted in our office (and I honestly think it’s a cool photo). I want to be clear that the safety violations I’m talking about are very, very unlikely to be something just on the Contractor alone.
Look, man, there just aren’t as many people needed on a jobsite as we did in the ’30s
That’s another way of saying we could have more jobsites for the same number of people. Which is good to know when everyone is crying “labor shortage!”. Whenever I see assets uncommissioned, I ask why we as a society are not commissioning them, and I get told it’s the labor shortage.
for a fucking photo opportunity
Don’t do unsafe things for a photo opportunity, check.
the entire society not valuing safety
and now the entire society does. Honestly, this sounds like an exercise in i-suppose-you-thinkery: “I suppose you think we should go back to unsafe practices!”
@John Schilling
So that’s where the Department of Irradiation came from.
But I think spectrographing anything that isn’t nailed down is more like basic research than busywork.
Folks in pure maths faculties are not trying to do anything practically useful but decades later, their research turns out to be unreasonably effective in the natural sciences.
Assuming that raw people are your only limiting factor, sure. But that’s very much not the case. A lot of people were employed as laborers, whose job was to pick things up and put them down somewhere else. This isn’t even a skill, while safely operating modern construction machinery isn’t something you can do naturally. So we have to train people in that, and provide them with machinery. Both of these are going to be major bottlenecks.
Also, people are more expensive these days. CatCube has lots of stories about how this has changed dams and such, but I’ll use naval manning. A modern American destroyer has basically the same crew as a WWII-era destroyer, despite a fourfold increase in size. And the USN is definitely not in the vanguard of manning reduction.
@bean > “Assuming that raw people are your only limiting factor, sure. But that’s very much not the case. A lot of people were employed as laborers, whose job was to pick things up and put them down somewhere else. This isn’t even a skill, while safely operating modern construction machinery isn’t something you can do naturally. So we have to train people in that, and provide them with machinery. Both of these are going to be major bottlenecks.
Also, people are more expensive these days. CatCube has lots of stories about how this has changed dams and such, but I’ll use naval manning. A modern American destroyer has basically the same crew as a WWII-era destroyer, despite a fourfold increase in size. And the USN is definitely not in the vanguard of manning reduction.”
And that’s a reason why I think we need more “employer of last resort” actions, they’re simply less jobs now for guys “on the left-hand side of IQ distribution”, and more guys now aren’t considered marriageable, which on average shortens their lives and increases the likelihood that they’ll be jailed, and/or become addicts. Single women don’t seem as harmed by their status as men are, but they do report lower levels of happiness, beyond that though I think most folks want to feel useful, which does mean the jobs need to not feel like “bullshit” ones, which frankly is harder to do then just cutting checks, but somehow our grandparents generation did it.
Regardless, I see a need for re-building infrastructure that’s overdue, and I’ll remind that the folks doing construction work don’t have to be the least employable for more construction jobs to increase the demand for employees.
Say a youngish man works at the parts counter at a motorcycle shop in Oakland, California for chump change and learns of an opportunity to earn more working construction jobs in and near San Jose, California – that guy moves on and a job opening is created at the motorcycle shop (which was filled by the ex-wife of customer of the shop BTW), extra openings cascade through the labor market.
Another factor is that private businesses need to make a profit to stay in business, while governments don’t (well, not to the same extent, a thriving private sector does help in revenue collections, but governments may borrow a lot more), and often private businesses just won’t hire folks that they consider too expensive to train (especially when a competitor may “poach” their skilled employees), this is where on-the-job training in government jobs may help, i.e. my “international” (Canada and the U.S.A.) union has found that just admitting military veterans works better than interviews and/or tests to decide who gets hired as apprentices, as the vets “turn out” and become journeymen at higher rates.
If it was true that the average guy that’s holding down a job at the garage could just jump into a construction job so that a guy that is unemployed could jump into the garage job, why isn’t it already happening? There is a labor shortage in the construction industry, how is adding more projects going to fix this? Is the new WPA going to accept lessor workers than the private firms currently do? Will they pay less? Will they lower safety regulations? What is the mechanism that will move all these non-construction people into construction jobs?
“Have more apprentices”. Construction firms really dont much care for having apprentices around, because they are not as fast. They hire them at all only because the union and the government both leans on them in the interest of still having a construction workforce in twenty years. A wpa-novo program can elect to not care that it takes 30% longer to build that train station because half the workers are learning, and if it works, private industry will hover them up as they learn the trade.
@Jay T > “…Is the new WPA going to accept lessor workers than the private firms currently do?…”
Yes, that’s kinda the point.
“..Will they pay less? Will they lower safety regulations?..”
Hopefully not but probably there will be some loss of safety as new untrained hires tend to have higher accident rates.
“…What is the mechanism that will move all these non-construction people into construction jobs?…”
Most know that construction is “boom or bust”, an expectation that the busts will be softened by an “employer of last resort” will attract to and keep in more in the trades, but I remind (again) that the historic WPA employed folks in jobs that weren’t construction.
There’s a few overlapping things:
1) Is there infrastructure that needs rebuilding?
I’d say so, even if there was even hire labor force participation (IIRC men’s participation was highest in the ’50’s than now, but total is up because of more women with paying jobs).
2) Are there folks who could’ve found work before that don’t now?
Unless somehow the men of the ’50’s were much more fit and talented than the men of today are I’d say so.
3) Is “college for all” a good idea?
I’d say that the increased numbers of “some college but no diploma” indicates no, a lot of folks just learn better on the job than in the classroom.
In San Francisco there’s a couple of poorer than average neighborhoods, and back in the early ’90’s an “afirmative action” program that reserves some entry level City jobs for folks from those neighborhoods, as well as an ordinance mandating a set percentage of large private employer construction jobs done in those areas be for local residents (you don’t actually have to be poor, or black like those neighborhoods used to mostly be, I know a white guy who wasn’t poor who got hired that way, he just wanted a job closer to home).
One of the entry level jobs is steam cleaning the streets so they don’t smell so much like urine, and most anyone with a nose can tell that this is a job that’s worth being done and there’s call for the job to be done more of.
Again, having folks do work that seems useful isn’t as cheap as just cutting checks, but I think would be a good thing dignity-wise, on top of that I think there’s public benefit work that should be done anyway (i.e. the bridges @Conrad Honcho mentioned).
Maybe I’m dumb, but the argument that safety standards would be officially lowered seems like a non-sequitur to me.
Safety standards in general were lower back in the 1930s. The fact that they were lower during the time of the WPA doesn’t mean that the WPA contributed to or is dependent on said lower standards.
Is there any evidence that safety standards were deliberately lower than industry standards under the WPA?
You hear this, and you could imagine a world where that’s true. But I have a hard time making sense of “he’s not good enough to marry but is good enough to be the father of the child I’m having out of wedlock.” I think marriage declined because good behavior declined(among both groups) and not the other way around.
You’re assuming they have no agency.
@Alexander Turok
That makes perfect sense if the available men are bad providers, but have strong genes.
Government welfare policies that act like a provider for single moms compete with men, who need to provide more value than welfare.
@Aapje,
Sure, it makes sense in that cultural/ecological context. But when Plumber spoke of “marriageability,” he was speaking as if the women in that context are using the concept in the same way women would have in 1950. In the mindset with which women in 1950 thought about “marriageability,” that behavior makes no sense at all.
My grandfather told me that when he was a young man during the Depression, he had a job polishing the concrete on a bridge by hand. That is, rub this rag over this concrete until it shines.
Do you know whether your grandfather was doing this in a construction context or a maintenance context?
If the former, it might not be pure make-work. It’s pretty common to work the surface of newly-poured concrete as it sets, to even out the surface, push down larger pieces of aggregate so they aren’t sticking out, and to make give surface either a glassy-smooth finish (e.g. garage floors) or a rough non-slip texture (e.g. sidewalks). The last step is usually done with a trowel or a brush or broom today, but I suppose a rag might work in place of a brush.
Or your grandfather’s account could be oversimplifying the task. You can also use a rag to apply a finish (usually mineral oil or a vaguely paint-like concrete sealer product) to add some shine and a bit of weather-resistance to the concrete.
If he was maintaining an existing bridge, however, then polishing the concrete with a rag does sound rather silly and may well have been make-work. Nowadays, I’d expect a pressure washer or sand blaster for a functional heavy-duty cleaning. Back then, I’d expect a good scrub brush. Using a rag to scour grime off concrete sounds like trying to dig a ditch with a teaspoon.
@Conrad Honcho >
Good point, I tend to assume that thr lasting beauty and utility of the works of then are evidence enough that “make work” may be useful, but I drive on a ’30’s public works built bridge, went to a high school that most of the buildings there were a W.P.A. project, as was my nearest public library branch, and even a sidewalk not far from my house, so I’m a bit biased.
It’s been interesting to listen on SSC to the consensus about bad homeless people. I tend to figure “there but for the grace of God go I”, particularly in a country that’s big on rugged individualism and not so big on social safety nets.
There’s a collective action problem here. Each individual town/city can provide for a small number of homeless people with reasonable compassion, but nobody can afford to take care of all the nation’s homeless people. Add to that, there’s probably a hard core of homeless people who just need to be institutionalized for their own safety, and no compassionate program is going to work well with them unless it involves treating schizophrenia.
It’s pretty clear from what you wrote that you don’t really see the homeless as your fellow humans, and that they don’t really cause any actual problems, you just don’t like encountering them.
I essentially have a negative empathy for your predicament here. I mean, one some level I can understand the natural reaction of fear and revulsion you’re experiencing, I just don’t think it’s valid or that it should be considered when making important decisions like how to help people survive the elements. (And I say this as someone who had no qualms about throwing out homeless people trying to sleep in my tenement’s entrance hall. Streets are public spaces, you don’t get to decide who can and cannot use them for a reason.)
“loss of property values, business revenue, policing & jail costs, loss of tourist revenue, etc” aren’t actual problems?
Um, zoning decisions are absolutely a thing, no piece of property in any developed country is a free-for-all where you can simply build whatever you like. As public spaces paid for by taxpayers, and living in a democracy, citizens absolutely do get to decide who can build what where. Or can I replace your neighbor’s home with a biker bar, nuclear power plant or mercury manufacturing facility?
I specifically listed alternate options for shelter locations- industrial areas, or rural ones with a designated bus service, and I’d be happy to pay for any of them out of my tax dollars. This is why I used the slightly inflammatory phrase ‘do gooders’, because I really resent the moralizing where simply building a homeless shelter isn’t enough- you have to literally be OK with it moving in next door or you’re a bad person. A shelter built elsewhere would be awful, because reasons. In general I support more social welfare spending, and anyways I spend a third or more of working week just funding that.
My point is that the externalities of something that attracts a vast population of homeless is bad for the common good, and that it’s OK to consider other human beings besides just the homeless when making decisions. We can accept balances and tradeoffs, etc.
The argument is not about whether homeless shelters should be supported with public funds- I’m for that- but *where they should be physically located*, and who gets a voice in that. How about the 50% of the population that would like to be able to walk down the streets of their city without being catcalled, harassed, subject to crude comments, possibly assaulted, etc.? Do you have negative empathy for them?
You could try, but that would be a pretty terrible business decision. My quiet, expensive, residential neighborhood would be a very sub-optimal location for any of those enterprises.
Those won’t work because the homeless won’t go there. My hometown actually tried this once. They thought they’d clear out the encampments around downtown by finding some farther away rural-ish location (with a nearby bus route) where the homeless could camp in peace and not bother anyone. Win-win, right?
lolno. The homeless don’t want to be in some remote area (even if there’s a free bus). They want to be near fast food, public services, parks, and high-foot traffic commercial areas where they can more efficiently panhandle. Put more bluntly, they want to bother people. So nobody left for the nice, new, official camp, and the local cops didn’t have the stones to remove them by force.
I’m curious whether you think this strengthens your case, or weakens it.
The comment about streets hints to me at a cultural difference here, in which one culture thinks of the commons as communally owned, and the other thinks of the commons as entirely unowned; or perhaps there is a discrepancy in terms of who the community is.
I analogize to walled gardens and witches, and wonder if maybe the end result is what we already see now, with walled communities for the affluent, who can afford to be separated from the witches.
Ah, but we do decide how streets and public spaces get used. All the time. Presumably, you can get fined for littering or not picking up your dog’s shit where you live? Public disturbance is also punishable, I am guessing? Indecent exposure laws are a thing, yes?
Anti-loitering and anti-vagrancy laws have been around for ages in some form or another. The effect of such laws is that, yes, you are free to use streets and other public spaces in the same manner as other people (e.g. for getting from point A to point B), but not in a manner they aren’t intended for (e.g. for sleeping in).
There’s a good reason for this and it has little to do with “[not] really see[ing] the homeless as your fellow humans” and very much to do with the requirement that all members of a community must abide by the same rules and share a broadly similar system of values if you want any level of trust.
It is beyond question that there is a sizeable portion of the homeless population that does not share the same values and abide by the same rules as the rest of the community (shitting in stairwells is not a done thing). Whether this is purely due to difficult circumstances or whether there is some element of choice involved is an open question. Nevertheless, you cannot embed a minority that abides by a completely different social system in a community and expect to not have a conflict. If the community fails to either bring such minority in line in some way, or expel it from the location, the community shall disintegrate because its individual members negatively affected by the presence of the minority will decide membership in the community isn’t doing them any good.
Worst case scenario, you get a Hitler, because he makes a compelling case for solving the unsolvable.
Trying to prevent obstruct other peoples’ charitable activities is rarely a good look and something I would have a hard time getting behind. The problem here is that you’re accepting that you live in a society where hobos will be able to get away with all these already criminal behaviors. And then you propose responding with a different type of aggression. My three-part plan:
1. Legalize flophouses.
2. Police and prosecutors begin enforcing laws against hobo criminality, stop the catch and release crap.
3. Repeat offenders get long terms in an exile ghetto.
Note that 1) is, at the low end, just a for-profit (and so very likely more efficient and pleasant for both users and neighbors) kind of shelter; I imagine this will pretty much take care of the problem all on its own. My understanding is that long-term homelessness basically didn’t exist before these were banned, especially if we can work out something to replace now-diminished religious and community-organization charity.
Also note that, tactically speaking, I think that you literally could not have chosen a worse name for 3) than you did. I propose something like ‘rehabilitation community,’ or is that over the line into suspiciously euphemistic?
Let’s say you wanted to build a schooling curriculum that was based around “skills” rather than “subjects” as such. What are the five general skills you would want to focus on to best serve a young person? To get an idea of “how general” I’m thinking here, this is my own proposal, roughly sorted in order of importance:
1. Effective communication (this would mostly be focused on informal writing, public speaking, and basic powerpoint and other visualizations)
2. Basic numeracy (this is where “math” goes, focusing on arithmetic, fractions, percentages, and basic algebraic equations)
3. Information gathering (how to locate and critically evaluate various sources, basic statistics and probability theory)
4. Problem-solving techniques (case interview logic, basic excel)
5. Intelligence signaling (humanities, arts, pop culture, basic science, and pretty much everything else that 99% of people don’t really need to know but will make you look smart and/or help you fit in)
This would be designed for something like K-8, with high school age shifting to increased specialization in specific disciplines, based on the student’s particular interests.
There should be some kind of socializing practice. Many people come out of high school not knowing how to have a conversation. It’s not because they’re “introverted”. It’s because they don’t have to.
Could you say more? I’m having trouble picturing this.
A lot of people don’t know how to make small talk.
BTW, my advice is FORM: Family, Occupation, Recreation, Motivation. And really the first three should be modified by the last.
“Where’s your family from? Oh, really, why’d [you|they] come here?”
“What do you do for a living? Oh, really, what made you want to get into that?”
“What do you like to do for fun? Oh, really, how did you get into that?”
Obviously not everything is going to land, but if they can get through all three without taking the open-ended question bait they probably just really don’t want to talk to you.
Also I sometimes short circuit the process by asking “So what’s your deal?” “What do you mean?” “Oh you know, where you from, what’s your family like, what do you do for fun, hopes, dreams, fears, all that good stuff. What’s your deal?” Works okay for me.
I’m having trouble picturing someone who can’t picture this. There’s a ton of people in this world who can barely keep any form of communication on track for more than two minutes.
Christ, one time I ordered a pizza carryout, went to the pizza joint, walked in, and took more than a minute to figure out how to say “I am toastengineer, give me my pizza.”
I don’t believe I’ve met anyone who literally didn’t know how to have a conversation. I’ve certainly met people who didn’t want to, either with somebody in particular, at some particular time, or about some particular topic, or who had had a long day and were too tired to do a good job of it – that’s me pretty regularly. The former is indeed a problem, but not one I think is going to be amenable to classroom instruction. The latter is not a problem at all, and I think treating it like one is likely to work out about as well as open-plan offices – very badly for me personally and everyone else who values peace and quiet.
@Statis
You ever have a conversation with a young child? They either go on rants about something they are interested in, ignoring you, or they clam up whenever you ask a question. A lot of people aren’t much better than that. Every person should be able to have a five minute conversation with anyone they meet. Why? Because you can’t have meaningful connections with people until you know them. Small talk leads to big talk. Having meaningful connections is a good way to keep people from shooting themselves in the head.
This should definitely fall under “effective communication.”
One of my biggest problems with how education works is that we have “classes” that cover topics like “public speaking” or “english composition” but we present these things as hyper-specific domains that are useful in specific academic or professional contexts only.
That’s all wrong. Yes, giving a formal lecture on an academic or general interest topic to a seated and quiet audience for a specified amount of time is public speaking, sure. But arguing with your friends over whether Batman could defeat Captain America is also public speaking. Introducing yourself to a stranger at a party is also public speaking. Giving a toast at your brother’s wedding is also public speaking. And so on.
The “effective communication” bucket is basically “be good at talking and writing in their most common and useful forms.” Small talk is definitely a common and useful form, so it should be included.
@Matt M says
That looks like a very good list to me, I’d add “shop” (basic carpentry), and “home economics” (basic cooking) to your list.
I’d have high school as it exists now just be two years at most, and then have college for some, and vocational school for most, while “barista with a PHD” is a minority, and most college graduates do better than non-graduates, the increasing numbers of “some college, but no diploma” are getting hosed, and would’ve been better off learning a marketable skill, or just earning an income and getting job experience.
In some ways “college for all” seems a Ponzi scheme, with enough of the jobs for graduates just being teachers or in college prep (judging by my peers who went to college, the vast majority of those who graduated became public school teachers).
How To Think (which might slot as 3.5 on your list). For younger kids, “The Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments” continued for older students with David Hackett Fischer’s Historian’s Fallacies.
This is not a viable plan by any means but I think it would be hilarious if we taught students a system of beliefs, constantly drilling it in to their minds, and then the last week of high school tell them that it was all lies. Mix in some half truths and illogical inconsistencies and see if anyone figures something is wrong.
I really think it’s useful to have a certain core of basic knowledge about the world. I mean things like knowing that the world is spherical, with continents separated by a mass of sea, some parts of which have names. Or that we used to have kings, but now mostly have presidents. Some of this comes under the heading of intelligence signalling, but it is more broadly useful for having a sense of what the world looks like and how it works. If you are reading an article about France, say, and need to understand some current issue, it’s really useful to be able to find it on a map.
I’d put the basics of science, history, and geography here.
This. It’s easy for those of us who read random wiki articles for fun to underestimate it, but some basis in general knowledge is really helpful in making good decisions about broader issues. Used to, one of the main purposes of education was supposed to be creating the knowledgeable citizens necessary for a democracy. (Yes, David Freidman, I know about rational ignorance.) I don’t think we should lose sight of that entirely.
What if I told you that 80% of the American population can’t locate France on a map, and that this is not inhibiting their daily life in any significant way?
“Intelligence signaling” might not be the best label. But I see this as the equivalent of the “self actualization” tip of the pyramid in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s a worthy pursuit and you should do it… if your basic needs are already sufficiently met.
For the average person, gains in communication, mathematical, and reasoning ability could make meaningful differences in their ability to improve their circumstances. Gains in knowledge of European history won’t.
1. Literacy – being literate, then being well-read
2. Rhetoric – basically effective communication
3. Numeracy – being numerate, and being intuitive about size, amount, money, estimation, extrapolation
4. Logic – everything from lateral thinking to critical thinking I guess
5. Civics – knowing who and where the fuck you are and what’s going on around you, how is this not a bigger thing
Temperament classes. People who are agreeable need to learn a little bit of independence in though and vice versa.
I’m curious why you’d want to do that?
I agree that we should have a list of skills that students have when they leave school/college/university, but that doesn’t mean we have to structure the curriculum that way, nor that a subject-based curriculum won’t teach skills alongside.
Take your “numeracy” for example, which I agree should be on the list. Whether you label one of your classes “numeracy” or “math” I don’t mind, but I don’t see how you can turn out students with the skill of numeracy without teaching the subject of math (or, as you say, the topics of fractions, percentages etc.)
For another example, “coding” is a skill whereas “Programming in Python 101” is a subject, but I don’t see how you’d teach the skill without settling on a particular programming language to teach, at which point you’ve created a subject.
Working in teams (leading, following, resolving conflicts, delegating tasks)
Presuming we have an eight class schedule:
1.) Numeracy & Mathematical Problem Solving (ie, math and how to create math problems to simulate situations)
2.) Literacy, Speech, & Composition (how to read, write, speak, and communicate)
3.) Accounting, Business, Finance, & Economics (ie, here’s how you manage a household budget, here’s how jobs work, here’s why businesses hire and fire, etc)
4.) Civics & Citizenship (America is great, some history, here’s how the government works, here’s some basic skills we need in our citizens, maybe some integration with service and self-defense.)
5.) Science of choice
6.) Art of choice
7.) Sport of choice
8.) Trade of choice
For the last four, students would be committing to multiple years (four?) of courses. They would be designed so that a student who took the full course would be competent to do at least some basic work in the field and someone who took the full twelve years would probably already have the equivalent of a bachelors or maybe even a masters in the relevant field.
The goal would be for the first half to establish a basic set of common knowledge and skills (everyone can read, write, knows how to balance a checkbook, knows about voting…) The second half would allow people to self-select into specializations. Rather than passing them through a bunch of milquetoast half-baked general science or music classes, let them start specializing in being a chemist or a guitarist from a young age. Force them to take one of each so they’ve got a diversity of skills but otherwise let them choose.
Why require everyone to take a sport, a science, and an art? Any of the three is something that some people can live a happy and productive life without. Probably any two, especially given that you already have items 1-3.
I’m in favor an approach that biases schooling much more towards what students want to learn, much less towards what other people think they should be made to learn.
I think it’s a good idea for them to try one of each, at least, so they can see if they have a talent for it or take a particular liking to it. Don’t force them if they don’t like it, but I think it’s a good idea to say to kid “do you want to play an instrument? Which one? What’s your favorite instrument?” and get them some lessons for awhile. If they don’t like it, fine, but for all you know they could take to it like a duck to water and have something that gives them
joystatus for their whole life.I debated that and if it was a real proposal that system would be more complex. To illuminate the thought process, the trade is so they have a way of supporting themself and the sport is a way to backdoor in physical fitness. That leaves two, which ideally could be different to give them some degree of breadth. I’m not married to those two being a science or an art by any means. That’s also where I’d put aspiring historians, for example.
I don’t have this fully formed but some kind of ability to observe what you’re doing, and what the likely outcomes are.
Hopefully the kids will develop that anyway, their prefrontal cortices are still very much under construction.
Ah yes, renaming school subjects as a political marketing deal. We had a little of that craze when I was a school student, so instead of drawing classes we had “visual education”, and instead of history classes we had “history and civics” or some such. It didn’t actually change anything about what was taught.
Message from my Wells Fargo financial advisor, of all people, about coronavirus. Not just to me, to all his clients:
“I received this from a client whose brother is on the Stanford hospital board. This is their feedback for now. The new Coronavirus may not show signs of infection for many days. How can one know if he/she is infected? By the time they have fever and/or cough and go to the hospital, the lung is usually 50% Fibrosis and it’s too late.”
I want to a) fly to New York and punch him in the face, and b) take away all my money and give it someone with an actual brain.
What is it about this behavior that upsets you exactly? (Also, what is “this” in the message?)
Well, it’s wildly inaccurate, right? He (or his source) is basically saying that by the time you develop a fever, you’re likely to have 50% scarring of your lungs and be well on your way to the morgue.
Can fibrosis even happen that fast?
I thought that was a chronic aftereffect of lung damage.
The guy is a dope. I wouldn’t mind so much, except my 90-year-old mother also uses his services and I don’t want her panicking (or, worse, calling me while she’s panicking).
Don’t fly to New York to punch him in the face; you might get coronavirus. Do take away all your money from him, though good luck finding a financial advisor who has both an actual brain and the desire to use it for his customer’s benefit (as opposed to his own).
I’ve seen this a couple times on Facebook now by people I would have thought would be much to smart to spread such nonsense. Not great.
Well your advisor won’t be there for long. WFC compliance has almost certainly heard about that email already. Big brokerages frown upon this kind of speculation to a surprising degree. I was written up when I was at a big Fortune 500 brokerage for telling a client that Obama wasn’t going to cut his social security.
But really you should be using an independent fiduciary. Wells Fargo is a joke in just about every aspect of their business, and if he was any good, he wouldn’t be there.
that particular message seems to have spread internationally. an aquaintance forwarded this (translated basically word for word) in German with some more awful nonsense.
Who comes up with this stuff?!?
Best pop/rock/folk songs about death, Coronavirus panicked overreaction edition!
Richard & Linda Thompson, “When I Get to the Border”
Leonard Cohen, “Who by Fire”
June Tabor, “Now I’m Easy”
Bob Dylan, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”
Blue Oyster Cult, “Don’t Fear the Reaper”
Jethro Tull, “Locomotive Breath”
Any other candidates?
Arguably “blues” and/or “country” rather than pop/rock/folk, but I’m not sure where the lines are:
Townes Van Zandt – “Waiting Around to Die” (recorded in 1968)
Joan Osborne doing Dylan’s “Man in the Long Black Coat” (recorded in 1995)
Blind Willie Johnson – “Jesus is Coming Soon” (recorded in 1928, about the Spanish flu!)
I should create and share a Spotify playlist. I wonder if I can monetize something like that and profit from other peoples’ despair?
R.E.M. – Try Not To Breathe
Also:
the Mountain Goats – Matthew 25:21
The Decemberists – Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)
Elvis Costello, “God’s Comic”
Maybe a little less direct but still great:
Johnny Cash cover of “The Mercy Seat”
Rolling Stones, “Paint It Black”
Better: “When the Man Comes Around”
Sufjan Stevens, “Casimir Pulaski Day” or “Death With Dignity”
Steven Wilson, “Happy Returns” or “Routine”
Radiohead, “Reckoner”
King Crimson, “Epitaph”
Opeth, “Ghost of Perdition”
Temple of the Dog – “Say Hello 2 Heaven”
Oooh, good choice.
The best pop song about death (and atheism) is “Tell Me There’s a Heaven” by Chris Rea. See “https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/31/open-thread-113-75/#comment-686627”
For the titles only, it’s obviously Another one bites the dust versus I will survive.
Someone care to write new lyrics?
Tom Lehrer, We Will All Go Together When We Go. It has all a song needs – death by nuclear fire and punny rhymes!
So who like me bought the dip in the first few days and have seen the dip go further?
My friends believe my superpower to be to influence the market – the more I buy, the more it goes down in the short term! Never have I lost so much so fast. While I primarily bought index, I also put about 3% of my stock holdings in cruise ships…of which RCL is down by over half in less than two weeks.
Anyone else have unwanted super powers like this?
You haven’t lost it until you sell it. And that is a fantastic superpower, you could easily get rich with that, by buying and selling incrementally; say the market goes down 10%, buy with 10% of your assets. Follow it to the bottom, wait for random fluctuations to bring it back up, sell, and repeat.
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/2270/
I sold 50% of my investments (which had, up until then, been 100% in stocks) and put it into a money-market fund in late January 2018, and then maintained 50/50 stocks/cash up until now.
By my math, that means you’re about even to slightly behind with where you’d be if you stayed in stocks, before taxes.
In hindsight, a better move would have been to shift the money into long-term bond funds, which show a total return of about 30% (mostly from interest rates dropping) since a year ago.
But that’s hard hindsight: a year ago, I would have expected interest rates to be more likely to go up than to continue to go down. That’s why my bond allocation is in short-term bonds, which are much less sensitive to interest rate changes in either direction. When I want to accept more risk for more return, that’s what my stock allocation is for.
Yeah, I wasn’t bragging. I’m a little ahead because the Trump tax cuts gave me a tax advantage for selling in 2018, which did factor into my decisions. The algorithm I put together is good at telling me when to sell (it also called out late September 2019) but bad at telling me when to buy. So, essentially still pretty useless.
I’ll brag. I sold enough index funds on January 23th, 2018 to make up the downpayment for my house. My closing got delayed because the bank screwed some stuff up, so that was about a month after I was supposed to close, during which the market went up over 10%, and 3 days before an 8 month peak. And I got the bank to kick back some of the closing costs for screwing things up.
If that was luck, I think you must have burned up a whole monastery’s worth of karma.
@cassander
Are you me? We’re closing today and I did the exact same thing. I pulled out over half my 401k in a “401k loan” in order to make the contingency requirements for building my house.
I got the cash back in late January, but sensed the market turmoil so I’ve just held it in cash.
@broblawsky
It certainly wasn’t skill!
Meeee!
After seeing the dip last Friday, I figured things couldn’t get any worse. I’ve had a cash position I’ve been meaning to convert to equities for way too long, so I logged in and bought my diversified ETFs.
Then Russia decided to destroy the world economy or something.
I really don’t understand people saying this. In the 2008 crash, stocks ended up losing ~1/3 of their value from the peak.
Based on that sort of logic, I’m waiting for the S&P to fall below 2,000 before going shopping myself…
stocks ended up losing ~1/3 of their value from the peak.
Over 50% actually (going by the S&P500)
I did some tax loss harvesting, and finally got around to putting in some spare money that had been sitting in my bank account which I’d been meaning to invest for a while now anyway. But for the most part, I stick to the exact same strategy regardless of what the market is doing. Trying to time the market is a fool’s game. Being consistent will at least mean you don’t panic and buy high sell low like most people.
This is why it is ill advised to follow your investments if you are buying for the long term. You don’t want to know what happens in the short term.
This looks like a ‘sell the bounce’ market, not a buy the dip market. Uncertainty is almost always bad for markets, and it is going to be hard to get a sustained run in this environment.
I work for the aerospace arm of an events company. Their stock is down 40% since the start of the year. I was going to invest in the employee stock purchase program, but I had an unexpectedly large tax bill that ended up eating the money that was going to go into it. So I’m feeling kind of smug, actually.
Honestly, you should basically never invest in your own employer in any case.
That’s what the startup lottery is all about.
They’re giving us a substantial discount on the price, paying all the fees, and shielding us from taxes until we sell, so all in all it was a pretty good deal, especially since I’ve maxed out other options and have a lot of other money in more diversified investments.
This. I max my ESPP purchases and pocket the 10% discount my employer gives us by selling immediately; as long as there’s less than a 10% drop between the purchase date & sale date you’re still ahead.
@Ghillie Dhu
Ours was better than that, we got the lower of the beginning or end of the quarter, then 15% off.
ESPPs are an exception to that, because they usually give you a substantial discount on the stock. It’s basically free money with the downside that you have to hold stock for a year or two.
Maxing out your ESPP is often a good idea because of the favorable purchase terms most of them give you, but you should usually sell the shares as soon as you get them (or, if the ESPP sucks, as soon as they vest). With typical terms, that sale usually nets you 15-30% (depending on how the stock’s been doing) on your money over six months to a year, which is about as good a risk-adjusted investment as you’ll ever make.
Yeah, I thought that went without saying. Never hold more stock in your company than you have to, lest your 401k goes the way of the Enron 401ks.
Although the tax treatment of ESPPs specifically means there are rare cases where it makes sense to hold onto the stock for an extra year before selling, IIRC.
My employer sells me stock at 15% less than the minimum price at the start and end of the investment period. If you sell instantly, even with the stock falling, you’ll get most of that 15% as profit. I consequently put as much of my pay cheque into this program as they’ll alow.
Where you get in trouble is when a combination of doing this, but not selling, and collecting additional stock via RSU bonuses, leaves you with too much of your money in a single stock. But I’m no longer concerned about that stock being my employer’s – they are far more likely to lay lots of people off in a successful attempt to raise the stock price, than to get into hot water and start laying people off even as their stock price tanks.
I’ve got a bond allocation (Vanguard’s short-term corporate bond ETF) that has post-dip risen to about 15% of my portfolio. I’m planning on rebalancing that down to 10% or less, but not immediately because I expect the market to keep trending down as long as things are actively trending worse. I’m watching the new confirmed cases count for signs that COVID-19 spread is contained in the US, and I plan on trading based on that. I don’t think it’s contained now, and I expect the confirmed new case numbers to continue to rise sharply (making things look worse than they are) as the bottleneck in testing capacity gets sorted out.
Me! I have about half my income going into stock ETFs all the time anyways but this sale was so exciting that I’m cutting costs to channel more money in and the sale keeps getting better! My wife is starting to get ticked about this behavior so I might need to go back to just all the automatic investments…
“Don’t try to catch a falling knife.”
I would’ve, but preppers had already bought up all the tortilla chips.
Don’t worry, even the world’s worst market timer can turn a healthy profit over the long term!
That story only works because the guys name was Bob. If his name was Sota* its suddenly a much different problem, he’s investing in the Nikkie at almost 40,000 and its currently at 1800 and he has not seen a return on that money in 30 years, and interest rates have been near zero for that whole stretch and taxes steadily rising so saving that amount of money was more difficult than in the US. The author wrote that in 2014 which was 24 years into the bear market in Japan with a series of lower peaks (which was finally broken in 2015, but the recent decline is still well below the 2000 peak and near the 2007 peak).
It drives me nuts that people are using the stock markets in the strongest economy in the world over the last century and act like they aren’t cherry picking.
*Googled common Japanese names.
The Italian stock market took 70 years to recover. The 1900 era Russian stock market never recovered.
People who think stocks only go up in the long run are benefiting from survivorship bias in the US.
Than let’s make sure we neither have a communist nor a fascists revolution shall we?
The point is that an international investor in 1900 would have had little reason to favor the US over Russia based on the information available at the time.
You mean except that one is an economic backwarter that can’t win a war with an nation that literally still was in the feudal age 30 years before, and the other is one of the most industrialized places in the world, that spend the last 50 years gobbeling of the former Spanish Empire, and was the biggest coal, steal, grain and cotton producer in the world?
I mean, you are right no one could have known that the Bolshewiks would take over Russia. But those are the kind of events, were keeping your money in cash, wouldn’t exactly help you either.
At the time, Russia was industrializing, freeing the serfs, etc. I think it would be a bit like investing in China in the 1990s, and noone would look askance at you for that.
Russia was absolutely the China of the pre-WW1 period. Its economy and population were both surging, and just as many eyes look to China and its emerging geopolitical power, it was fear of Russia’s seemingly-inevitable rise that led the Central Powers to be eager for war in 1914. In 10 years, they didn’t think they could beat Russia. The smarter minds in Russia wanted to postpone war for as long as possible.
Russia performed poorly in the Russo-Japanese War, but if the people had the political will to keep going, they probably could have prevailed (at least on land). Japan was broke and didn’t have nearly the ability to fight a sustained land war that Russia did. In their decisive land victory at Mukden, the Japanese still took a lot of casualties.
If WW2 in the Pacific had ended with the Japanese conquest of SE Asia and the Philippines, it would be remembered similarly.
The Russian Empire had deep political problems. But as an investor, this could be seen as an upside opportunity from political reform. The idea of a socialist revolution that permanently wiped out investors seemed pretty far-fetched compared to the alternative scenarios. As late as a few months before the October Revolution, Lenin himself didn’t think he could do it, that it might take another generation.
If you’re trying to decide how to balance between stocks and bonds, the fact that the Russian stock market went to zero is irrelevant, because the bonds were also repudiated.
Douglas Knight,
There are 4 categories of jnvestments, not 2.
Cash and property didn’t exactly do great during the revolution either.
Gold does.
I’m guessing most of the people that had gold, didn’t get to keep it.
Well, I sold at the dip – the last Friday of February, before the Fed rate cut (and the consequent uptick). I was kicking myself for a while, but it seems like it was the right bet. Now I’m waiting to buy, but can’t decide how to do it.
I guess staggered investment is the way to re-enter the market at this scary time.
As someone who has never dabbled in the stock market, how would I go about buying the dip? Should I bother, given I don’t really know what I’m doing and am just going off what other people are saying about markets always recovering?
Right now, you would be very likely to be catching a falling knife by the blade. The market will turn when there are actual good news – that is, a vaccine or alternatively, when the epidemic has burned out. Until then, lots of space on the downside.
Ok, thanks.
I’m also wondering about the efficient market hypothesis.
Is it possible that an asymmetry exists, because people (and companies) are trying to gain liquidity right now and are therefore desperate to sell? I’m fine for liquidity, I can afford to invest a little bit of money, would this be my comparative advantage?
Good lord no, the market is drowning in liquidity. Also, this is a panic, people are pricing things by guessing at how scared everyone else is. If you want to time the crash, I think the best bet is to be plugged into the efforts to develop a vaccine and treatment – if you can manage to know when a treatment regime is going to appear before the average market participant, you can buy off the back of that.
There’s lots of space on the downside, but there’s also lots of space on the upside. It seems that if you have money that you don’t _need_ any time soon, now would be as good a time as any to buy into the market. I’m not trying to get fancy or anything, but I’ve been saving up cash for this, and plan on investing in some mutual funds.
Even though it still had a long way to go down, Summer of 2008 would have been a great time to go long on the Dow.
Last OT we talked a bit about whether schools should close.
Separate question: given that my kids’ school has not closed, should I pull my kids from it and limit their contacts to a small group of carefully selected friends? I don’t have any issues about being able to afford it and I don’t think it will much increase their contact with vulnerable people. It seems prosocial to do my small part to bring down R0.
Is your school going to let your kids complete the year remotely if you pull them?
Let’s assume there are no academic impacts.
Seems like a dubious assumption to me. Though I do think a lot of public school is useless busywork, there’s a good proportion that’s actually useful. Being able to ask a teacher your questions in real time can be majorly helpful (vs. reading a textbook or watching a recording). And for some people, lectures are just easier to learn from than a textbook in general. Plus, if you know what the teacher is focusing attention on in class, you know what to focus your attention on when studying for the exam.
All that, not even considering the practical issues of “the school is not closed and your kids are expected to be there physically.”
In any case, I suspect the marginal impact of a single (non high-risk) person or family self-quarantining, without everyone else doing likewise, is quite low.
It stops your kid from being the vector that infects you. I figure that school transmission is just about guaranteed given how children act.
If your area doesn’t have any cases of community transmission, waiting it out is probably fine; let things function for as long as they can. In my area, the school system is asking people to self-quarantine for 2 weeks after spring break if they travelled anywhere. That will probably be the end of the in-school year for us. (We are planning travel; will self-quarantine afterward; figure other people probably will not; expect that the school system will make the decision to send all the kids home before those 2 weeks are up).
My kids are young enough that academics hasn’t gotten “real” yet. They’re not getting tested in any way that matters. There aren’t grades that matter for anything.
If this was high school I’d be more concerned.
I suspect the marginal impact of a single (non high-risk) person or family self-quarantining, without everyone else doing likewise, is quite low.
This is the sort of thing I was thinking about. Naively, the number of interactions goes as the square of the number of kids in a class, so the first to self-quarantine actually has a higher-than-average impact, right?
@Edward Schizorhands
Sure, that’d be a good personal benefit, but I don’t think it would be terribly prosocially relevant.
@Chalid
Hmmm… I was thinking in terms of “it will probably spread to everyone no matter what, unless everyone self-quarantines”, but thinking about it more the rate at which it spreads could be important. A fairly scaremongery article* makes the case that slowing the rate of infection, even if the same number of people get infected, will help ensure that everyone doesn’t get infected at the same time. The goal being to avoid or mitigate the disaster scenario in which hospitals reach capacity and can’t handle all the cases simultaneously.
*ETA: the same one that @matthewravery just linked in a top-level post
slowing the rate of infection, even if the same number of people get infected, will help ensure that everyone doesn’t get infected at the same time
Right. There is also the effect that we will better understand how best to treat the disease over time (there a couple drugs which preliminary evidence suggests help people survive – moving infections later means that there’s more time for people to understand those drugs and mass-produce the ones that turn out to be effective). Also, there’s a good chance that summer weather will suppress the virus, so delaying infections helps a lot there too.
If there are no academic impacts I’d argue you should never send your kid back. Most schools are hell for the types of people who are likely to post here.
Do you live an area where there has been high community transmission? If you live in Seattle, that’s probably a good decision. If you live in some small town, it’s probably excessive.
Greater NYC area (on the opposite side from the New Rochelle cluster though).
We are doing it. We will pull the kids out of school after tomorrow.
… and the school closed anyway. Well, at least I was prepared.
*sigh*
After hearing that the school closed, my wife’s parents offered to help babysit. We told them very strongly that it was unsafe, that the whole point of schools closing is to protect people like them from the virus, and we’ll have the rest of our lives to spend together if we are careful to get through the next few weeks or months safely.
So, naturally, they’re babysitting my brother-in-law’s kid instead 🙁
(I know, I know, get a blog)
I’ve been pondering the social equilibrium around remote work.
I’ll observe that there were many events, such as power outages, at the company headquarters when I worked for that company remotely, which meant from the perspective of our clients business continued as usual.
This leads me to a thought that decentralization of this kind brings with it some substantial resilience against localized problems.
However, I think it imposes a higher entrance fee in terms of conscientious, which, given that looking around most of my coworkers spend most of their time not doing work already, may override those benefits.
There are also network effects which make being in the same location somewhat more beneficial.
I think the former would require invasive levels of monitoring to counter – in terms of people being aware they are being monitored to the same extent they are in an office, if not more – and the latter requires some substantial technology to mitigate (both real and social), which maybe we’ve been making strides towards anyways in terms of coordinating offshore teams.
I think the monitoring, if the social equilibrium continues moving in favor of remote work, is probably inevitable for some things. (Other things might be measurable in terms of output, so avoid that issue.). Likewise I think technology will eventually render network effects substantially insignificant for most professions, and the increase in delivery services will render most interpersonal contact basically irrelevant.
So, my expectation is a new class divide will begin forming between remote work, and work that cannot be performed remotely.
Also, society will become even more atomized. But I expect a countercultural trend of increasing local community involvement, as people start experiencing greater social contact needs currently fulfilled by their occupations; I expect the major beneficiaries there to be religious institutions and community organizations (Moose Lodges, for instance).
Increasing local community involvement is dependent on having the time and energy to participate. If remote work hours are less productive per hour but maintain output, then the worker is taking it easy at remote work over a longer period of time, which still leaves them less time and energy outside of work.
I expect more of a “convenient social consumption” trend, a la startups that arrange singles’ events, wherein atomized people purchase social experiences, pushing off any organization effort onto others as paid work. Convention customer to volunteer is still a rare narrative.
So it looks like Bernie is all but done. (Or is it, is there any way for Bernie to come back and win this?) I’m trying to find whether Bernie is doing worse or better than in 2016. This suggests he’s doing worse in 2020 than in 2016. Is it because he’s a bit more woke than an economist populist as he was in 2016? Or is it because people are afraid that he’s less electable than Biden? Probably a bit of both but I’m curious to hear your takes. I’m also curious whether you think Bernie supporters will vote for Biden or whether a significant chuck of them will sit it out.
Cards on the table: I don’t like Trump as president.
That being said, he will almost certainly win re-election and in terms of this particular race it matters very, very little whether it’s Sanders or Biden. The record for the incumbent for the last 50 years is almost unbeaten, the incumbent has won the last three elections with an incumbent (Clinton, W, Obama), all the people that voted for Trump the first time are unlikely to switch sides for either Biden or Sanders, etc.
The record for the incumbent for the last 50 years is almost unbeaten
“50 years” sounds like a lot but it’s actually a really small sample and most of it is of dubious relevance.
If we go back 100 years, n=15, and P=0.8.
90% CI using Agresti-Coull: 59% – 92%
if there’s a recession, I think it’s very likely trump is done no matter who gets the nomination.
I think that very much depends on the extent to which people blame COVID-19 for the recession. If there’s a downturn because, hey, crazy virus what do you do, and we just need to keep on plugging with the economic policies that were working right up until then I don’t see there being that big of a hit.
Not sure I agree, as the blame will inevitably be placed on the people in charge not managing the crisis correctly.
It also depends on how much people blame Trump for the government’s handling of the outbreak.
Though I suspect that the effect of the economy does not actually depend on whether people consider it to be the president’s fault or not in the first place.
Does anyone seriously think the federal government can do much about the outbreak?
It seems like perhaps the same sort of motivated reasoning thing we get into about whether or not the economy is the president’s fault. If it’s your guy in office and the economy goes bad, “well, there’s not much the president can do about the economy.” If it’s the other guy in office, “this schmuck tanked the economy!”
I think the response to the outbreak should mainly be done at the local level, with schools and businesses closing as needed depending on local conditions.
Just because our government will probably screw it up doesn’t mean that there’s nothing that could be done. South Korea has managed to get it under control right now.
Conrad, I’m reminded of W’s experience.
After 9/11, he was clearly seen on the front lines doing something – standing on the rubble, forming TSA, bombing Afghanistan, etc. People tried to second guess him and there was a whole Congressional inquiry into whether his administration had dropped the ball prior to 9/11, Michael Moore made mean movies, etc., but IMHO, voters weren’t moved because they saw him out there doing stuff.
On the other hand, the Katrina response was a mess of failures at different government levels, but Bush took a major impact because people didn’t think he was out there getting stuff done.
Maybe. I kind of think an epidemic is qualitatively different. After a terrorist attack you can go visit the wreckage, visit the first responders, grieve with the families of the victims, bomb foreigners. Same with a natural disaster although perhaps less bombing of foreigners. If you don’t do those things it’s very easy to look at the President and say “why didn’t he do those things I would have done?”
But nobody really knows what a leader should personally be doing about a nebulous epidemic. So it’s hard to judge him positively or negatively when you have no idea what you’d do, either.
The federal government could have done something about the outbreak last month by getting out of the way and not stopping hospitals and private labs and anyone not the CDC from testing people.
To echo Scott, the reason we’re late addressing this virus is that the government threatened to shoot anyone who tried to test people for COVID-19.
How do you figure administering unverified tests to people who don’t have the disease would have helped us a month ago?
I don’t know if you saw this, but there was an article in the NYT today that made me absolutely furious.
Apparently there was a Dr. in Seattle who was already collecting samples from people for an unrelated study. She was barred from testing her, again, already collected samples for COVID 19 due to the fact that since they hadn’t consented to this screening it was apparently unethical.
When she ended up running the tests without permission she found several active infections. Had she been able to do the tests earlier, she would presumably have been able to warn people / quarantine faster.
I think it really depends on how the US ends up doing compared to other countries. If things continue as they are right now, even if the US is severely impacted, as long as there is a country like Italy doing worse, I don’t think Trump will get too much blame. If the US ends up getting it worse than any other first world nation, then I think he will get the blame.
The whole “Trump will win if the economy is good, loose if there is a recession” bit is predicated on most voters seriously thinking the federal government can do much indeed about macroeconomics. Compared to that, believing the government can do something about a viral epidemic is sane and reasonable. So, yes.
Also, Trump had his chance to play the “this is a catastrophe that no one can do anything about card”, and he had his chance to play the “Only I can save you from the dread Yellow Coronavirus Peril”card, and he instead went all in on “Move along, nothing to see here, it’s all just a Democrat hoax anyway”. And there’s a fair chance that will work out for him, with northern-hemisphere spring and decentralized action by everyone but the Federal government synergistically combining to end the pandemic.
But if it doesn’t, if the reason the US economy has tanked is the hundred thousand dead bodies stacked up outside overtaxed hospitals and the hundred million Americans afraid to come out of their house to work or consume, or anything visibly like that, then yeah, people are going to believe that Trump could and should have done more. And the Democrats will spend about a billion dollars of Michael Bloomberg’s money reminding them.
isn’t it pretty universally accepted that the ‘average voter’ will give the president undue credit or blame for the economy, regardless of things in the presidents control? I don’t see why we are now suddenly being charitable towards the publics ability to distinguish the factors influencing the economy???
The drop in the stock market has been directly linked to the virus, so in this case the average voter has a concrete villain to blame that isn’t the president. Similarly, I don’t think W. Bush was all that affected by the early 2000s recession, because in the public’s mind that was because of 9/11 (even though it started a few months before 9/11).
On the other hand, the 2008, 1991, and 1980 recessions didn’t have an easy scapegoat, and the party in charge lost their next election.
isn’t it pretty universally accepted that the ‘average voter’ will give the president undue credit or blame for the economy, regardless of things in the presidents control?
100%. We are not much better than people voting for witch doctors based on the recent weather.
What John Schilling said about Trump and the virus is true, too. Trump tried to bluff his way through it, and frankly that worked for a lot of other things in his Presidency, because a popular President with a good economy can bluff his way through lots of things and make things in the political world happen by declaring them to be such. But you cannot bluff a virus.
I’m officially registering my predictions for both “blame for virus” and “blame for economy’s reaction to virus” as “I don’t know and I don’t think you do either.”
> due to the fact that since they hadn’t consented to this screening it was apparently unethical
Scott wrote a piece about his IRB nightymare and a subsequent post of comment highlights.
We’re decided that in exchange for being certain that we don’t do experiments like the Nazis we’ll just let people spread disease instead.
Aftagley, Garrett – I read the NYT piece yesterday, and it made me think of the IRB nightmare article too.
If you think it’s worthwhile to have regulations forbidding people to use samples for purposes the subject haven’t consented to, and forbidding research labs from doing clinical testing, then it’s reasonable to ask when, if ever, the FDA should be waiving those regulations.
Those restrictions don’t just cost lives here, they cost lives every day, but we’ve apparently decided that’s worth the cost.
There may be some exception that allows the FDA or the president to waive the regs and allow studies without subject consent, and I could see arguing that based on what we knew then, someone should have thrown that switch, but I’d like to know more about the regs and the process.
@J Mann
My understanding is that whenever there is such an exception, there’s another spiderweb of red tape waiting to catch you as soon as you cut through the first layer.
There’s a phenomenon where as soon as people start noticing a trend and try to use it predict something, that trend stops happening. See the whole discussion about “inverted yield curves”. And even ignoring Bush senior, the unbeatable incumbent trend only goes back about four times.
There was a sci fi story where this happened. Rules of thumb and other trends started breaking down from being used, and at the end even the laws of physics broke down. I think the explanation was that when humans observe the rules they start breaking down, and bigger rules took longer to break but smaller rules broke almost immediately.
Vague memory and only tangentially related, but does anyone remember this story?
I can remember a SMBC about it but having a hard time finding it.
I do remember the story, it was in some random collection of short stories. Only other detail I remember is that the main character is an African scientist.
The punchline, spoilers I guess, is that now that they understand the rules about how the rules stop working when we understand them, that rule will stop working soon and science will start working again.
I remember the story, or at least a story about statistical regularity breaking down. I don’t think there was any explanation.
Isn’t an inverted yield curve a predictor of recessions/bear markets over the next year? The curve inverted last Aug/Sept. That seems like it would make the current swoon another success, if the markets continue down.
The problem with this logic is that there was also an unbeaten record of rich guys with no prior electoral experience trying to muscle in on the Presidential election and losing… until there wasn’t. These days I think we should revise upward all our estimates of previously unprecedented political things happening generally.
i think a bigger problem is considering 4/7 ‘unbeatable’
3 out of 5 is almost unbeaten?
i miscounted
its 4 of 7 right.?
carter,ford,bush
obama,clinton,reagan,other bush.
the current streak is three, but this hardly looks ‘almost unbeatable in 50 years’
there is a path to win even if they dont
Minimum-variable explanation: a lot of people just really hated Clinton without being particularity interested in Sanders’ policies.
I expect approximately everybody who voted in the Democratic primary to also vote in the general, most of them against Trump rather than for Biden.
Interesting. I dont think the first part is controversial at all, but I’ve never heard of people supporting Sanders just out of spite for Clinton. Maybe they exist, but if they really hated Clinton, they’re probably not in love with Biden.
A big lesson I’ve taken from the 2020 primary season so far is that people are a lot more superficial than you’d think. Even the educated Very Online political junkies. Especially them.
Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren have practically nothing in common besides being older white women with law degrees. And yet, the crowd that was most enthusiastic about Clinton, the pragmatist, centrist career politician, went gaga over Warren, the wonky ideologue who came to politics late in life. For all their talk about how much policy matters, apparently all the Pantsuit Nation really wanted was a woman in a pantsuit, it doesn’t matter who.
Meanwhile Biden picked up most of the unenthusiastic Clinton voters, the rank-and-file who’ll vote for whoever the machine wants them to vote for. And among people who were voting Sanders just because they couldn’t stand Clinton (for whatever reason), Biden is superficially different enough for them to support.
Their policies were very different, but not their attitudes or the way they spoke to people. They both pitched themselves as cool, competent, educated, no nonsense believers in science and studies that absolutely reeked of high status blue tribe. And the attitude matters way more than the policies, which most voters don’t really know about beyond the level of slogans. People want someone in power about whom they think “this person is like me”, or at least “this person has the back of people like me”.
You can call that superficial if you like, but I think it’s incorrect to say that they had little in common.
Not really true, they didn’t go for Gabbard, Klobuchar, they went Warren specifically.
Warren had the most name recognition of those three, though. If Klobuchar had been in the public eye starting a few years ago instead of Warren, I think she would have had Warren’s levels of support, or higher.
@JayT-
Warren’s strength was college-educated white women. This demo tends to be more liberal than moderate, so IMO Warren’s policies and background are a much better fit than Klobuchar. Name recognition and first-mover advantage probably had something to do with it, too, but I think the policy match was better with Warren.
I still think that Klobuchar would have had more support than Warren did if their place in the public conscience was swapped, because the college educated white women would have still gone for Klobuchar in large numbers, even though they might be to the left of her (they went for Hillary, right?), but Klobuchar had a better chance to connect to men and people without college educations.
What I mean by superficial is: there’s virtually no difference in what the government would be like under Clinton versus under Biden. They’d have largely identical policy priorities and they’d hire most of the same staffers and Cabinet members off the DNC rolodex. There’s a big difference between either of them and Warren. And yet Warren is seen as Hillary 2.0, while Biden isn’t.
It might be my special neck of the woods, but didn’t those people also regularly said they wanted a woman?
So people who say they want to be ruled by a woman, vote for a woman. There where some funny coalitions around Chancelor Merkels first election here in Germany. Or at least I thought they were funny back than.
It’s not a question of voting for Sanders out of spite; it’s about voting for a president that you don’t hate. Most of the people who were going to vote in the Democratic primary at all, already hated Donald Trump. If they also hated Hillary Clinton, what else were they going to do? Throw their vote away on a third-party candidate?
Bernie Sanders, for all of his problems, isn’t really hateable. His policies legitimately frighten a fair number of people, but most of those normally vote in the Republican primary.
Which, come to think of it, is another major difference from 2016. The economic pragmatists in 2016 were voting in the Republican primary even more than they normally would have, to ensure that the GOP not fall into the abyss of Trumponomics. In 2020, they’re more likely to vote in the Democratic primary because that’s now the best place to find an economically pragmatic alternative to Donald Trump.
This seems like a really excellent summary.
I’m not sure there are that many people actually changing party registration from election to election.
Not all states require to to register with a party to vote in their primary. Seem’s like it’s right around 50/50 open vs. closed primaries (but please don’t quote me on that) and even in at least some of the closed primary state people registered as independent get to pick which primary to vote in (North Carolina is this way for sure).
So it doesn’t require changing registration for this to happen, in many cases.
Lots of people will choose a candidate for a petty reason, and then retroactively decide they liked all his policies to avoid uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.
I think the past 3+ years of political coverage have greatly underrated this as a factor in the 2016 election. Lots of folks, but most electorally relevantly, working class whites, despised Clinton. In the primary, this manifested as Sanders doing well with these groups and pulling out unexpected wins in, for example, Michigan. This year, running on essentially the same platform against a DNC-backed establishment politician with similar policies to Clinton, Bernie is doing worse in that demo basically everywhere.
Clinton’s weakness with working-class whites persisted in the general against Trump. It’s unclear whether Biden’s (relative) strength with this group will also carry over. It seems clear to me that the DNC’s calculus in backing the centrist over the lefty is that the hit in excitement from the left is worth it if it helps you win back some of the Obama-Trump voters and helps make sure you don’t scare away all of the suburban whites that helped you win the house in 2018.
I see folks on the left gnashing their teeth about re-running the 2016 playbook, but that doesn’t seem like an awful electoral strategy: (1) I don’t see any way you get folks to hate Biden as much as folks hated Clinton. The right has been going after HRC since, like, 1991. Biden’s rep is as a bit of an old-fashioned goofball who occasionally says/does inappropriate things. I just don’t see him sparking the level of vitriol HRC did. (2) Clinton won the popular vote, and that despite the biggest “October surprise” in decades caught her in the form of the Comey letter. (Which, incidentally, fed directly into long-standing narratives about her.) (3) Trump is no longer an unknown in government. He remains ~10 points underwater in terms of popularity. Whereas in the voting booth in 2016, folks could still imagine him to be lots of things or “mellowing” as he governs or moving to “the center” or whatever, there’s now less opportunity for wishcasting.
On the other side of all of that is the fact that he’s an incumbent, there isn’t a (major) war ongoing, and the fact that the way in which COVID plays out in the US over the next 2-9 months might matter more than any of the rest of that.
+1
FWIW, I’ve never *liked* Clinton, but I never hated her deep-down. I viewed her as condescending, likely corrupt, with a large policy platform I was strongly against. But it’s mostly intellectual dislike.
I have a visceral reaction against Biden. That stupid smugness combined with that smirk just gets to me.
I wonder if part of Sanders doing less well this time around is that it’s a result of Trump winning last time. As long as it looked as though Trump was obviously going to lose there was little pressure to avoid the more extreme candidate, since many Democratic voters thought he could still win. With Trump as an incumbent, the same voters think they need someone sufficiently centrist to pull votes away from him.
It’s empirically quite a large part, with something like twice as many voters in Democratic primaries yesterday saying in exit polls that voting for a candidate who was more likely to win was the most important thing vice a candidate whose policy positions they agreed with.
DavidFriedman, I have the same opinion of the brexit vote. Margin of victory does matter in terms of political capital, and imo many voted to leave thinking remain would win, but wanted to send a message.
He’s definitely doing worse than in 2016. See here https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Mar11.html (very good daily blog by the way)
Ok thank you for that.
@jermo sapiens says:
Yes.
Sure, Biden could put his foot in his mouth even worse than he has.
Yes, he seems more pro-immigration now.
Yes, I strongly guess that most working class Obama to Trump voters will still vote for Trump, and while Sanders may get a few more back than Biden will, Sanders won’t get as many other voters support than Biden, but more importantly it looks like Biden has longer “coattails”, and without Congress no progressive agenda would be enacted anyway (not that much will happen under Biden anyway, he himself said “, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else”.
My guess is that maybe 20% of Sanders supporters won’t vote for Biden in the general election, but California and Washington (which Sanders won) will still vote for the Democrat in November, while Biden has a better chance to win in Virginia, and North Carolina, and Biden has a slim chance to flip Texas, which if he did would win him the Presidency.
On Biden’s campaigning in South Carolina, from The New York Times, February 29th “Joe Biden’s Last Stand”
and from today
So that’s Joe Biden, tongue tied, rambling, not all there all the time, but it looks like he’ll be the nominee.
I find it endearing in a “could have a beer with” way similar to how George W. Bush was, but I can see how others would be repelled.
I feel kinda bad for Sanders and his supporters (for the record I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary, and I mailed in my vote for Biden in February before South Carolina voted), but (like most Democrats my age and older) I voted for Joe.
For demographics: I’m a 51 years-old, white man without a college diploma, I voted for Clinton in ’92, for Dole in ’96, Kerry in ’04, and for the Democrat since.
I think this is the right answer. If you look at where Sanders is doing better than 2016 it’s among Latinos and young whites. Where he’s doing worse is working class older whites and blacks.
Basically Sanders made the mistake that @Plumber keeps warning everyone not to make in that he confused the Twitterverse with the Democrat primary electorate.
This is my view also.
I think the notion that being an immigration restrictionist (relative to current levels) is racist extends beyond the twitterverse, but people’s revealed preferences show that the number of non-racist people who would rather reduce immigration levels is quite large. And if this is true, as long as an increased social safety net is tied to opening our borders even more, the US will not vote for an increased social safety net.
Doesn’t have to be immigration, does it? Perhaps for latinos, but I suspect the young whites are the woke young whites, who now no longer have a woman candidate as an alternative. Working class would probably prefer the moderate Biden to the radical Sanders, but Sanders to the arrogant/elite/bureaucrat Clinton – in a “could have a beer with” way. I don’t think Clinton qualifies there.
@EchoChaos, >
Thank you, I’m feeling very vindicated right now after a year of most of the NY Times/Washington Post voices going “Of course it will be Bloomberg/Warren!”, until they changed to “Well, at least it’s not Sanders/How could you peons not vote for Warren!”, making me start to doubt my guesses until I changed to thinking of them: “Mike Royko and his generation of pundits seemed much better at this than you guys and ladies”
Note that Biden occasionally forgets that himself, as when he yelled at a union guy for asking him about gun control.
Definitely take your victory lap.
I’m a regular reader of NYT and Wapo and a couple other magazines. The strongest I remember them ever being in support of Bloomberg was “yes, he’s a weak candidate, but maybe we shouldn’t dismiss him out of hand.”
@EchoChaos > “…Note that Biden occasionally forgets that himself…”
At this point it’s clear that either Biden forgets the last time, or he’s just learned to like the taste of his own feet.
At least we got ”lying dog-faced pony soldier” out of this election cycle.
A gem for the ages!
I suspect the closest to a winning campaign move would be a few scripted speeches (long on “unity”), and telling Biden to just flirt with a lot of old ladies until October, but otherwise stay quiet.
I don’t think I’m misreading the electorate to say that most voters nearly 20 years after 9/11 and within ten years of the Great Recession are craving a Taft style “return to normalcy”, and a ‘Silent Cal’ type of “don’t rock the boat” presidency, maybe with a mild expansion of Obamacare, but otherwise keep the Social Security and Medicare checks coming, and don’t change much for a while, I think the electorate wants “sleepy”
An Eisenhower, not a Reagan or Roosevelt (not that Biden has the temperment or the frontal lobe capacity for radical change anyway).
A lot depends on who succeeds Pelosi and McConnell but, assuming she, he, and/or Schumer have a say in their successors the next few years should be a time of coasting.
.
@Aftagley > “I’m a regular reader of NYT and Wapo and a couple other magazines. The strongest I remember them ever being in support of Bloomberg was “yes, he’s a weak candidate, but maybe we shouldn’t dismiss him out of hand.””
My apologies, it’s likely then that since my wife supported him, the thousands of television ads broadcast this year of his, plus my deep dislike at the thought of Bloomberg winning made the pieces I read supporting him and predicting his triumph stick out, like a broken bone, memorably for me.
Since I didn’t do a count I don’t doubt you.
Also, Biden is a stutterer. The reason you probably don’t know that is that he he has mastered the art of covering it by, when the words he wants to say get logjammed somewhere between the brain and mouth, immediately shifting to different words even if they aren’t always the right words. Usually they’re close enough, and anyone who says otherwise is a lying dog-faced pony soldier.
Biden has said that he stutters.
In this one way, Joe and Trump kind of remind me of eachother. Both of them tend to be great to listen to in person. Taken as a whole, their speeches are fun, but they have a bad habit of containing little bits that don’t make sense and/or don’t look good when isolated out and played on TV. I speak from personal experience, even as someone who doesn’t like him it was easy to see Trump’s charisma when i was at a Trump rally, and I’ve enjoyed every Biden speech I went to.
Overall, I’d advise people who don’t think it’s a bid deal that Trump occasionally goes off script and says weird stuff during speeches to apply that same level of charity to Biden. I will be doing my best to to the same, but in reverse.
I was surprised that Bernie did as well as he did this year. Even being the favorite for a few weeks was a surprise result (imo). I think his main problems are that he has no energy, enthusiasm or charisma (compared to the top level candidates who come out of nowhere to win a primary like Bill Clinton/Obama, not compared to your typical 78 year old). Bernie can’t really sway you personally, you like his politics or you like his demeanor generally, but he won’t make large swaths of the electorate like him generally. You can be Joe Biden/Hillary Clinton that way because you politics are more or less center of the road for your party, so people can dislike you but still vote for you in large numbers.
IMO, Bernie’s big problem is that he doesn’t attempt to appeal to the majority of democratic voters. He has his (large, incredibly devoted) fanbase, but 35% isn’t enough to win elections when it’s down to a two person race.
Speaking of Bernie’s fanbase, I am looking forward to Reddit switching on a dime and going all in on Biden, who they’ve been bashing for the last 6 months.
I’m more looking forward to Bernie’s own speech at the convention where he wholeheartedly endorses Biden.
This would mirror I think nearly every primary either party has ever held. What’s to look forward to?
Biden does a lot better with blue collar workers than Hillary did. In 2016, Sanders won that demo, and now he’s losing it, so all he’s got are the kids and the serious progressives. That’s not enough to even keep it all that close, now that Biden has outlasted his rivals and consolidated the moderates and the institutional party.
I don’t really see Sanders as having changed much. My wife really liked Warren and more or less held her nose and voted for Bernie yesterday. Her comment, “Every one or Warren’s policies is intersectional, and none of his are, and you can’t talk about class if you don’t talk about race.” At least among the woke, Sanders is seen as rejecting wokeness in favor of older-style strictly class based appeals.
Real question – is the intersectionality of policies only about messaging, or are there supposed to be substantive differences as well?
I don’t know. I believe in this sort of stuff but I mostly take my wife’s lead on it.
So, I went to Warren’s campaign page. On her plan page, her fifth heading is “Ensure racial and economic justice and opportunity for all”. The first plan is “A Comprehensive Agenda to Boost America’s Small Businesses”. The first few paragraphs:
The stuff she wanted to do goes on for quite a while, and I’m just skimming it, but it looks to me like her point is that she would level the playing field, which would make things less favorable to the entrenched, big business interests, which would have the effect of helping black and latinx people more than anyone else because they’re the ones currently being screwed by structural racism.
Edit: screwed up the pasting.
Her proposal is outright discriminatory, though, as she only wants to give these grants to (some) minorities.
Note that they are not loans, but free money, which encourages scams, unless her “diverse set of investment managers” are unrealistically capable of assessing proposals.
Giving grants is also simply very inefficient, because you can help far fewer people that way. With subsidized loans, part of the money comes back and can be used on the program again.
Aside from being economically unwise, it’s also politically unwise, since it greatly increases the incentive to cancel the program (especially with the high amount of scams that I predict). The scams and the racism will likely make it very unpopular with non-woke white people, which is a huge boost for the Republicans in their campaigning.
It wouldn’t, though. Under her plan, a white person in otherwise similar circumstances would not get the same opportunity to get free money as a black, Latino or native person. If she excludes Asians, as she seems to imply, then Burmese Americans are excluded, even though their average income is below the average Latino income.
Also, my observation is that woke policies tend to be sold as helping poor minorities, but in practice tend to often actually help rich or otherwise advantaged people who are minorities. If that is the case here, where most of the money doesn’t go to actually disadvantaged people, but to the likes Oprah Winfrey and Robert L. Johnson, which are also entrenched, big business, then she wouldn’t be leveling the playing field, but just favoring one subset of big business.
Warren seems to believe that entrenched, big business is uniformly white, which makes it a huge risk that she equates minorities with poverty, not recognizing how policy for minorities can end up profiting a small and advantaged subset of the minority community.
Her campaign page is similar to an article she wrote for Medium, where she put in a paragraph that she left off her campaign website:
The small business gap is another example of how the racial wealth gap in America holds back our economy and hurts Black, Latinx, Native American, and other minority families and communities. And because the government helped create that wealth gap with decades of sanctioned discrimination, the government has an obligation to address it head on — with bold policies that go right at the heart of the problem.
This is false, of course. People who migrate from poorer places to richer places typically have less wealth than natives, because they couldn’t gather as much wealth in their old country. You can’t blame this on the new country being discriminatory. European migrants to America also very often started off poor and built up personal/family wealth over time, often over generations. Attributing this to structural racism is anti-white rhetoric.
Anyway, my conclusion is that it is not just messaging, but that Warren is woke in her policies as well.
—
I looked at Sanders’ campaign site and his woke rhetoric does appear to be superficial. For example, on loans he wants to eliminate redlining, which, unless he redefines that word substantially, is not racist.
His 10-20-30 program to increase government spending in communities with structural disadvantage, looks at historic poverty levels in that community, rather than at race. So again, not a racist policy.
So Sanders gets my Non-Woke Stamp of Non-Disapproval for his actual policies, unlike Warren. I can see why JonathanD’s woke wife would be discontent with Sanders’ actual plans for the opposite reason of why I am discontent with Warren’s actual plans.
@Statismagician,
@Aajpe actually did the assignment. Looks like it’s both policy and rhetoric that are intersectional.
@Aajpe, I should add here that I can’t imagine my wife ever calling herself woke. I’m pretty sure that calling yourself woke is strongly correlated to youth, and we’re forty-somethings with three kids. She would say she’s an intersectional feminist who believes in social and economic justice. I’m just using woke as the local shortcut.
Latinx? That term alone demonstates she didn’t write it, some 20-something campaign volunteer was given a handout on her policy and told to write something up for the website but make it catchy for The Youth.
I agree with Aapje; there are going to be some scammers attracted to this like flies to honey, because there are always some scammers everywhere who try to get free money. The problem would be if people trying to implement this scheme weren’t allowed to winnow out scammers because “that’s racism to presume that Manuel’s ‘holistic organic herbal remedy small business idea’ is a scam just because Manuel is a small-time drug dealer and his ‘remedies’ got him banged up for 5 years last time”.
@JonathanD
I think that the relevant distinction is whether one believes that disparate impact is enough (for example, helping the poor helps black people more) or whether one doesn’t require actual proof of the person being disadvantaged, but assumes it based on group-level characteristics/stereotypes.
If the policy merely stereotypes people based on one ‘axis of oppression,’ as Warren’s policy does, then I don’t see how it can be called intersectional.
After all, shouldn’t an intersectional policy treat people differently based on all their ‘axes of oppression’? For example, instead of giving all Latinos a grant of X, it should give a bigger grant to Latino women than Latino men.
Although doing this with the original definition of intersectional is nearly impossible, because that argues that combining different ‘axes of oppression’ results in a different outcome than just adding them up. So then intersectional policy can’t give Latinos a grant of X, women a grant of Y and Latino women a grant of X + Y, but there would need to be a grant level that reflects the intersectional oppression of Latino women.
@Deisach
What did you expect? That important politicians write texts and speaches themself? I wouldn’t even expect the first Handout to be written by her.
What did you think people like Miss Levinsky were doing in the White House?
@Deiseach
I don’t see how you can filter out the scammers in advance. How does Warren distinguish the person showing up with a decent plan that actually intends to start a business from one with a decent plan that will immediately spend the handout on coke and Lord Byron books?
It seems to me that the only way is to check that they actually did start the business without engaging in various shenanigans, so at that point you have to set up an auditing system that somehow distinguishes between the unwilling and the incompetent. That in itself is a nightmare.
And how do you prevent Whitey McWhiteface from giving a loan to Mr. Latinx, who then ‘founds’ a company with the government grant while Whitey secretly does all the work, where Mr. Latinx later has to sell the company to Whitey for the exact same price as the loan, to be able to repay the loan. With that scheme, Warren’s minority-only grant system suddenly becomes race-neutral.
Of course, the best way to game the system depends on the specifics, but it seems to me that it is not really possible to prevent fraud from being fairly easy, unless you spend lots of money on overhead. And even then it seems doubtful that it will work.
PS. Warren has said Latinx in speeches, so it is language that she uses, although those speeches may of course also have been written by 20 year old so-white-that-they-are-nearly-transparent unpaid interns.
I don’t know which is worse – that Warren let a campaign intern use “la tinx” without correcting it, or that she wrote it herself.
That usage needs to die. It’s ugly, it’s ahistorical, and it’s colonialist. Latinos have a perfectly good native-language term – “latinos” (in both Spanish and Portuguese) – which is not difficult for Anglophones.
(I’m part of that 97% of estadounidiense latinos who don’t prefer to be called “la tinx”.)
Did you intend to type “Latinx”, AKA “Anglo Social Justice Warriors colonizing Spanish in the name of anti-sexism”? Because as it stands, I’m trying to figure out who the Los Angeles tinx are. 😛
The term strikes me as one that must have been coined by someone who spends so much time reading twitter and/or X studies papers that they forget words are often supposed to be spoken aloud.
@VoiceOfTheVoid says: “The term strikes me as one that must have been coined by someone who spends so much time reading twitter and/or X studies papers that they forget words are often supposed to be spoken aloud”
Warren has said “Latinx” aloud, and when I heard her use the term in one of this years debates I immediately thought “There is no way this lady will win the election“, a thought admittedly mostly based on my Latino (and one Latina who workd across the hall who often eats with us) immediate co-workers (two of whom are ex-U.S. military).
Most of them are Democrats (but not all, one is pro-Trump) but none are “cultural progressives”.
Ha, so not only do the Woke have to say this out loud, they get flak if they pronounce it “Latin-X”?
On reflection, if you have to speak that word, “Latin-X” seems like the coolest way. It sounds like the X-Men’s ancient Roman-themed member.
Some people are actually using “Latinx men” and “Latinx women.”
:O
How do they pronounce it?
/ks/ like anglophone imperialists who haven’t bothered to check how many codas are allowed to go on a syllable in Spanish or with a velar fricative like someone who is saying ‘latin’ as they are about to sneeze?
I pronounce it like I spelled it: “la tinx”
Don’t do a google image search for “la twinks” at work, or if you’re offended by male nudity.
If one were to adopt a Latinx persona, would that be complicating things terribly?
What did you think people like Miss Levinsky were doing in the White House?
DarkTigger, certainly not what we were told she was doing!
How does Warren distinguish the person showing up with a decent plan that actually intends to start a business from one with a decent plan that will immediately spend the handout on coke and Lord Byron books?
Quote part of The Prisoner of Chillon and see if they complete the verse? 🙂
I’d imagine some kind of “okay, fill in this application form, tell us what your idea is, give us background information about yourself and what you’ve been doing for the past few years re: employment or whatever”. Ordinarily, people who have been in customer-facing positions for a couple of years dealing with public service and the public get to know the type of scammers and twisters who try things and to recognise a bullshit proposal when it’s being made. The upper levels who decide that a Community Business Grant is a great idea are the ones who over-rule any “Look, I know this guy, I know where the money will really go and it’s not to creating a local business, it’s to pay off his drug-dealer” protests by the coal-face staff.
And usually Start Your Own Business courses and grant-aiding do have conditions attached so it’s not just anyone who can stroll up and say “Gimme my free money”.
I’m part of that 97% of estadounidiense latinos who don’t prefer to be called “la tinx”.
Anthony, yours is the attitude I’ve seen when native-speakers and actual Latino/Hispanic people discuss this term. Personally, I was pronouncing it as spelled so “lah-tinks”, but I then learned it was supposed to be “Latin-Ex”. Truly, only people who get their knickers in a twist over gendered language would be so opposed to “how very dare other languages have gendered terms to distinguish between male and female persons” that they invented a new word that, ironically, ignores the feelings of people who are within those groups/speak those languages, all in the name of Diversity, Correctness, and Sensitivity.
I think the D primary electorate may actually be less leftist than 2016 due to the influx of former independents and moderate Republicans who hate Trump. The leftists are certainly louder and angrier this time, and they probably are somewhat more numerous in absolute terms, but they may not be more relatively-numerous.
I believe turnout in the Democratic primary is quite a bit higher than it was in 2016, but the increases have been in middle-aged and older voters, not the younger, more liberal ones Bernie’s campaign was premised on bringing in. For example, Virginia had nearly twice as many voters in the 2020 Democratic primary than the 2016 Democratic primary. Whether that’s because of the shift in the state’s voters (see the 2018 midterms) or because there wasn’t a Republican primary for independents to choose from is relevant is not clear.
@matthewravery,
Virginia and Texas both had open primaries, I’ve read a comment of a poll worker who said that in her town some residents requested Democratic primary ballots that in previous years requested Republican ones, and I’ve seen a few comments of folks saying that they’re former Republicans who voted in this year’s Democratic primary, more against Sanders than for Biden.
We’ll find out in November if they vote for Biden again or cross back.
Yup. One data point is the 2018 midterms, when both Texas and Virginia had House seats flip from Republican incumbents to Democrats. This is consistent with a theory of highly-motivated voters interested in getting rid of Trump. But both primaries and midterm elections (even ones with record turnout) are relatively narrow slices of the electorate that participates in generals.
I personally did that here in Washington. The Republican primary’s virtually uncontested; the Democratic wasn’t.
For November, I’m undecided between Republican and third-party.
I almost did that in 2016, in the hopes of stopping Trump, but then Cruz’s support collapsed in the last week and the Republican primary was over before it got to me, so I switched back to Democrat.
College-educated young voters and great recession victims are not gonna turn out for the bankruptcy reform guy. Trump in a landslide.
Curiously, the assumption seems to be that Dems need to cater to the moderates, and take for granted that the more progressive voters (who likely have the most passionate policy stances) will simply fall in line, when it seems likely that they will not do that, and that the reverse would have been more likely.
Progressive/leftist voters fell in line in the swing districts where moderate Dems got elected in the 2018 midterms. Why would they not do so in a presidential election with much higher (or at least higher-feeling) stakes? I can see people doing that if Bernie or someone of similar stature were to mount a third-party candidacy, but that seems super unlikely.
Where do those voters live? Do the Dems need those voters more, or do they need voters who wouldn’t vote for a Socialist under any condition but might pull the lever for Scranton Joe?
(Epistemic status: humorous)
I had a dream last night. I was in the backseat of a van, another young man was sitting shotgun, and George Mason economist Tyler Cowen was at the wheel, driving us through rural country. An audiobook was playing, and Cowen testily commented that he had heard this one before. I asked if he wanted to listen to something different, but he said no, adding after a pause that he was just really bored. We soon arrived at our location, somewhere in rural Alabama, and understanding came the way it does in dreams that Cowen was making a new reality show illustrating economic principles, and we were his assistants; I found the camera equipment piled in the back with me. It was a bare bones affair.
We set up a kind of Christmas ornament black market, so they must be banned in Alabama. And sure enough, people showed up. It was my job to illustrate the economic principle, so I tried to lead them into saying the function of a black market, but no one was picking it up, to my increasing irritation. Finally, one older woman got it, but as she made to leave, she told me patronizingly that “the public” had decided they couldn’t buy Christmas ornaments, and it was not for us to disagree.
I finally lost it, and yelled at her that the point of an economy was to satisfy desires, and for some people it doesn’t matter what “the public” thinks about it, whence black markets. Marking this down a failure, I went to Cowen with my tail between my legs. Given his attitude earlier I expected him to be displeased, but he was actually quite happy with how it turned out; evidently my exchange with the woman was just what we needed. Roll credits.
I look forward to your theories as to the meaning of this dream.
Sorry, I’m distracted by the observation that illegal drugs get sold in more concentrated forms. How do you concentrate Christmas tree ornaments? Advanced tech so that you expand the hollow balls when you get home?
Hmm.
Contact lenses that make everything sparkly and throw red-green on things.
Earplugs/earmuffs that look like conventional non-tech but actually store and play Christmas songs.
Red and green food coloring.
and, of course,
Illicit very small gatherings of people, secretly coming together to celebrate Christ, and picturing in their minds the larger communion of the faithful.
I’m assuming the law is based in prejudice against Christianity, but Christianity isn’t illegal. You can have your church services in churches, just no Christmas decorations.
Tinsel is a low-weight, low-volume decoration. People will hack LED strings so they just to red and green instead of a rainbow cycle.
Historically speaking, I think zombie Oliver Cromwell ruling with an iron fist would be a more appropriate reason to outlaw christmas decorations.
I’m assuming the law is based in prejudice against Christianity
Not necessarily, it could be the last revolt of good taste. Some (
manylots) of Christmas decorations are not much more than cheap plastic tat and ugly with it, and the kind of over-the-top “stick light bulbs on every square inch so that this one house could illuminate the entire continent” decorating leaves me cold 🙂Tinsel and shiny coloured balls on the tree are always fun, even if cheap’n’cheerful. Creepy snowmen to stick on the walls – not so much.
Bans on Christmas are not necessarily rooted in prejudice against Christianity: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jERu4rrM_lI/UBBfMEmeP4I/AAAAAAAABYA/iJj41UYYyqQ/s1600/article-1332096124019-12390FC5000005DC-933373_304x425.jpg
Laws requiring good taste would be interesting.
Illegal christmas stuff fall into the following categories.
1. Cheap christmas tree lights in which the bulbs are connected in series, with the single wire badly isolated, and occasionally shock people or cause fire. I’m not sure how to concentrate these: led lights instead of small incandenscent bulbs are possible now, and the leds are more concentrated, but they’d be proportionally less dangerous too.
2. Candles or candle-holders that often light the tree on fire. You could concentrate these to small cigarette lighters running on gas.
3. Cheap christmas tree bases that make it easier for the tree to fall over, thus facilitating the above fires and other accidents. These get more dangerous the more concentrated they are.
4. Shiny but fragile orbs that break into jagged pieces that cut your skin. You concentrate them by saving the trouble of breaking them to the customer, selling just the broken pieces, because then more of them fit to a box.
5. Sparklers. I’m not sure how to concentrate them.
6. Fireworks, though they’re more of a new year thing.
If the Berenstain Bears taught me anything, this means you must have spent yesterday listening to a Tyler Cowen audio book while putting away Christmas decorations and watching Pawn Stars or something.
One would think, but I spent my evening playing obscure solitaire variants, listening to Youtube videos about SCPs, reading Gene Wolfe, and editing the campaign notes for my Star Wars campaign. The dream is… well, about as far from those things as one can get.
It’s possible the Berenstain Bears taught me nothing.
Maybe I should have had your dream, I watched a stream of a weird recent game where you work in a tv studio.
Wasn’t much of a game, but there was some good humor in the f*ke news casts.
heh, screwed up my posts with some banned words actually used literally.
The folk psychology that your dreams are influenced by what happened to you that day has never, ever worked for me. Despite some of my best efforts to influence my dreams that way. The only time I have found it to be true is that if I spend many hours playing certain kinds of video games I end up dreaming about them. Games like Civilization, or Minecraft, or Stellaris can give me the most mind numbing dreams where I spend all night clicking buttons and trying to accomplish tasks, though nothing works the way it is supposed to.
It didn’t used to be that way for me, either. I would dream about random high school classmates that I hadn’t thought about in years, or celebrities I had only thought about months ago. More recently, though, I have had more coherent dreams on thoughts that I’ve nursed over the long term, including that day. So for me, it may have partially been a function of getting older, having less novel thinking.