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Idea: Instead of making a special periodic OT for coronavirus, Scott should just make a special OT for non-coronavirus topics.
Nah. That would leave us without a place to discuss coronavirus for a few days. If they could run in parallel though… that’d be nice.
As the number of coronavirus survivors who are immune to the disease grows, shouldn’t we try using them for special tasks that are too risky for yet-to-be-infected people to do? For example, should the government make a database of coronavirus survivors and ask them to work jobs requiring close contact with other people, like waiters and EMTs?
Without drawing negative historical comparisons, I think it might be helpful if survivors wore armbands or badges with large symbols on them (maybe a green check mark) so other people could tell at a glance that they were immune and hence safe to associate with.
It’s not clear how well the immunity actually works. Also, EMTs require training.
> EMTs require training
I suspect that whichever folks get diagnosed with and recover from Covid19 first are going to be going on *every* respiratory distress call until this is over.
Sometimes survivors can have the virus present in their lungs for a long time. I’ve seen several weeks. We can probably test for that.
If we are worried about them being contagious, though, we can just have them work with our confirmed-positive cases. (But see Loriot’s note that we aren’t sure how immunity works.)
I think we should do that with the “it’s just the flu” people.
Only viable in settings of personal acquaintance and relying on reputation.
To prevent criminal exploits you’d need a hard-to-fake ID badge or card, and/or online verification. Too difficult to set up in this situation.
It seems that Facebook has switched to all-AI content moderation, and that the AI is eating thousands of innocuous posts (including links to media articles about COVID) as spam.
Probably not a great moment to encourage the public to be more accepting of AI…
Facebook and Youtube have probably done more to curb the inevitable Skynet revolution than any AI risk institution.
Clearly a sign that AI is now super intelligent.
What irritates me about FB moderation is not that there are a lot of errors, which may be inevitable, but that they lie about the results. They say the site you are trying to link to or the post they are not letting you make violates community standards, when what they mean is “our software suggests that this might violate community standards and we are blocking it until we can check.”
That’s deliberate defamation, it’s dishonest, and it leaves them open to potential law suits.
Marc Randazza is a very good First Amendment lawyer who has brought lawsuits against social media companies for stuff.
I’m dead serious when I say you should contact him and ask if this meets the threshold of defamation. I love to see those companies taken down a notch, but these hurdles are hard to meet.
I have emailed his firm describing the problem. At this point they have finally stopped blocking links to my web page, but I expect there are thousands of other people in the same situation. It is possible that if they threaten a class action they can persuade Facebook to stop lying about their reason for blocking — and pay his firm some settlement amount to compensate them for bringing the problem to Facebook’s attention.
And it’s great to see that the current public emergency has encouraged the flourishing of the entrepreneurial spirit amongst the more disadvantaged of our local populace >:-(
Things like this make my Inner Saruman want to establish a Committee of General Security (or heck, just skip straight to the Revolutionary Tribunal).
An often overlooked aspect to the London Blitz was a truly staggering crime rate. Pretty much anyone could walk into a recently bombed house and start loading furniture onto a hand cart. Generally people would even offer to help with carrying the heavier items and wave cheerily as the burglar wheeled them off.
Welcome to Hollywood. This time, the Little Emperor/Executive Producer wants a film based on a playing card, the six of diamonds. What sort of film do you propose to make based on this theme?
Turns out The Six of Diamonds was his childhood sled all along.
The six of diamonds from the US DoD archaeology awareness playing cards:
The six of diamonds from the more famous ”most wanted” playing cards was Sabawi Ibrahim Al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother, who was the head of the Mukhabarat during the Gulf War. He was captured in 2005 and sentenced to death in 2009, but died of cancer before he could be executed.
So combine the two- the Mukhabarat are funnelling valuable artifacts out of Iraq for some unknown Nefarious Purpose…
“No, Doctor, we must keep him alive so that we can kill him!”
Couldn’t they just execute him faster?
Not without overclocking.
You can do divination/fortune telling with ordinary cards, so let’s see what various definitions have to say:
Diamonds are the suit associated with the element of earth. They relate to the material world and cover such areas as money, work, practical projects, homes, and so on. Diamonds can also represent the practical aspects of relationships. Diamonds are associated with earth.
Six of Diamonds – Relationship problems, arguments. Separation. Problems in a second marriage. Charity, offering/receiving help, supporting another financially. ANXIETY – Further material unrest; one is starting to lose control of that which is in and around one.
Six of any suit – Flow, Pattern, Communication; Ignorance
Diamonds: Independent, extravagant, impulsive, impatient, optimistic, dynamic, restless, analytical, intelligent, high strung.
Okay, I think we’ve got enough plot elements to be going on with. Naturally this is going to be a romantic drama – Wikipedia definition:
So we have our two leads (whoever are the current Hot Favourites for such parts, I can’t keep up with who is the new heart-throb/starlet) in a tale of star-crossed love, misunderstandings, and coming back together for the happy ending. Since this is going to be a chick-flick, we’d better put the focus on the heroine.
SHE is a high-flying career woman in the Big City with Important Job (note to lowly underling -find out what’s the flavour of the month in ‘Important Jobs For Career Women’ – is the fashion industry good enough or does she have to be, like, the Mayor or something?) She is (pick description from lists above)”Independent, dynamic, restless, intelligent.” Trapped in a loveless marriage to a successful (but not quite as successful as she is) city slicker who is all surface pleasantness and good guy but underneath the facade is self-centred and cheating on her. This is a trophy marriage as far as he’s concerned (his second marriage, see “problems in a second marriage”). She’s unhappy with her Successful Striving Big City Life and her Needs Are Not Being Met. But she doesn’t know what to do – this is the life she always wanted, why isn’t it working out? Hence “ANXIETY – Further material unrest; one is starting to lose control of that which is in and around one.”
HE is the one that got away – her smalltown childhood sweetheart who, lacking the same ambition and drive to strive and succeed as she possessed, was left behind (“Relationship problems, arguments. Separation.”) when she went off to college for Flashy Degree to get her Important Job while he stayed in their small town to look after the family farm/business/parents/three-legged blind puppies. She’s always had a measure of regret that it never worked out but always ruthlessly squashed it since he was a stick-in-the-mud loser and she was Going Places.
THEY MEET ONCE MORE when she takes the chance to get away from her stifling marriage and unhappy work life given by the excuse that she needs to go back to the old hometown due to her widowed mother/widower father/granny/that spinster aunt that raised her and whom she has been supporting with her Successful Work Big Salary (see “Charity, offering/receiving help, supporting another financially”) now having problems with health/getting older/the moustache-twirling small town villain who is threatening to evict them onto the side of the road in the cold freezing winds and snow, and she has to come home to sort it all out (which of course she eventually does, since she is dynamic intelligent etc. etc.).
Cue rekindling of romance, miscommunications, the whole nine yards until it is indisputably proven City Hubby is a big ol’ cheatin’ cheater (who possibly is embezzling or otherwise swindling from his job) when Ex-Wife of City Hubby from his first marriage turns up with the goods to enable Our Heroine to finally get free of him and start afresh with Old Flame. Because she is Successful High-Flyer she helps him turn around the failing farm/business/kennel for blind lame puppies and they live happily ever after with her fulfilled emotionally and as a person, she can too have it all, The End.
A biopic of Al Kaline. (Get it? He wore #6 and played for the Detroit Tigers? On a baseball diamond?)
God, I’m bored.
Al Kaline huh? Which base did he play again?
Any answer I gave would likely be a lye.
“Some people are what you call an Ace of Spades or a Queen of Hearts.
You? You’re more like
*draws from the deck being shuffled*
a Six of Diamonds”
What does a six of diamonds mean in the standard bidding system of bridge?
6 is an absurdly high bid, so it means that you think you have basically all the diamonds, or all the high diamonds plus good off suit cards.
So someone is trying to set up a world diamond monopoly. A (possibly fictionalized) history of De Beers?
That’s 6 diamonds (6♢), not the 6 of diamonds (♢6). Not what the producer asked for.
As a bid, it would have no connection with the card, but for completeness since a 6 bid is a small slam it might be bid by someone who thinks they can make a small slam in diamonds, or could be a conventional response to some conventional bid seeking information on whether and where to proceed to grand slam. But as for the meaning of the card, the only way to make sense of that is as a question about what it means to lead such a card. If it’s the opening lead, it probably indicates that partner should lead diamonds if partner gets the lead, though it might mean that opener has reason to believe based on the bidding that partner may be able to do something if diamonds are led. As an opening lead at no trump, it may indicate that diamonds are opener’s best suit and the 6 is opener’s 4th highest diamond. In pretty much all of these cases, there is an implication that the opener’s partner should play their highest diamond, unless that would be lower than whatever declarer has played from dummy. Also, for clarity, these are the implications of playing a low/mediocre diamond, not of playing the 6 specifically (no version of bridge I’m familiar with assigns coded meanings to leads of specific card numbers).
A jurisdictional oddity I found reading up on the crisis:
In California, each of the 58 counties has a health officer whose jurisdiction, by default, only covers the unincorporated areas outside cities. Each of the 482 cities can either appoint its own health officer or contract with the county to provide those services. Of these cities, only four have their own health officers. Five if you count the merged city/county of San Francisco, which I’m not sure how to, but it’s a special case.
Three of them are relatively large cities, namely Berkeley, Long Beach, and Pasadena. It’s not clear to me why they retained their separate health administrations, while larger cities like Los Angeles and Oakland are content with their counties’ health departments. But they’re large enough that it’s a defensible choice. (I wonder – could Berkeley go rogue and block local enforcement of the Bay Area shutdown? Just going off stereotypes from a few thousand miles away, it seems much more likely Berkeley would than a county – or any other city, for that matter.)
The fourth city is Vernon, population 112, the least populous city in California. It’s an industrial area near downtown LA whose only residents are city employees in city-owned housing. I assume the purpose for Vernon having its own health department is graft, because that’s the purpose for everything in Vernon. (I don’t know how the graft works, though – I figured it’d be a cost center.) It could create another potential enforcement gap if the Vernon health officer doesn’t extend the same policies as the rest of LA County, but I find it doubtful because Vernon is trying to stay on its’ neighbors good sides after recent bad press got the state to threaten to revoke the city charter. Besides, it’s almost too small to matter.
Reading the Wiki for it, it seems pretty likely that the position was created as make work for a family member of the government people. My steelman reason would be that meatpacking is apparently big there, so they felt like they needed to have a dedicated health officer keeping an eye on the industry.
Effective altrusim request! I’m in a position to move a bunch of money to efforts to help Americans (specifically Americans) who are struggling due to the economic impact of COVID-19 – workers not getting paid, people who must self-quarantine and need groceries delivered, etc.. What’s the best charity to donate money to in order to do that? So far, the best I’ve found is Modest Needs, which is doing a general fundraiser to disburse direct cash payments to hourly worker who suddenly are not getting paid. Modest Needs has expertise in vetting who would be helped most by the money (i.e., fine if they get a one-time payment, will be seriously hurt and need much more help in the future if they don’t).
Does anyone have anything better? Note that the people who I can convince to donate will be specifically interested in helping Americans deal with COVID and I can convince them to donate money they’d otherwise not donate at all, i.e. I don’t think this will displace any significant amount of money that would otherwise be donated to more effective causes.
(And to save you all the time: Givewell is looking in to charities to help with COVID but doesn’t have any recommended yet).
I’ve noticed that a disproportionate amount of trans, non-binary, and intersex people I know (including those who’ve never undergone surgery or taken any kind of hormone treatments) suffer from chronic pain, structural disorders, or autoimmune disorders. As a rough estimate, I’d say about half of the trans/NB people I know struggle with chronic pain, maybe as many as two-thirds. And more than half of the people I know with autoimmune disorders have been trans or otherwise not-cisgender, despite the fact that trans/NB/intersex people only comprise a very small minority of the population.
And while that’s all anecdotal evidence, there’s some minor statistical data backing this up too: An internet survey showed that roughly 35% of trans women have pectus excavatum (caved-in chest), compared to 1/300 cis males. Likewise, roughly 5% of trans men have it, compared to 1/1200 cis females. And while the survey was informal and probably doesn’t meet scientific standards, that’s still a truly astronomical difference, even accounting for any potential methodological problems. (I have pectus excavatum myself, as well as semi-frequent body aches, although I don’t know if my aches are strong enough or frequent enough to count as chronic pain, and they may result from bad posture more than anything else.)
Has anyone else noticed these correlations? And is there any possible reason for these correlations to exist? I know the science behind sexual differentiation and gender identity is still very much unknown, but this seems like something we should potentially be looking at.
Selection biases can make such things look that correlated or more, so I’m not sure if I would use the effect size as any evidence. Or maybe there’s group differences in willingness and desire to pursue official diagnoses. But if it’s actually a real effect, the obvious hypothesis is that developmental disorders are not independent events; if something goes wrong with one part of your physiology, it probably had a root cause that is likely to cause other disorders, too. That’s an easy enough hypothesis to test, because it predicts that developmental disorders unrelated to sex and gender would also be correlated.
I can’t comment on the pain/autoimmune angle, but wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that pectus can lead to body-image issues which correlate with transgenderism and general body dysmorphia?
I actually also have pectus, and its fairly pronounced. Can’t say I have much general body pain, but I definitely feel aches and pains in that area of my chest which I attribute to it.
I suspect both unusual gender identities and things like chronic pain would correlate with a tendency to be introspective and to worry a lot about your health and body. You can either see this as overdiagnosis in sensitive people, or as underdiagnosis in less sensitive people.
This wouldn’t account for the pectus excavatum finding, but considering that both trans men and women often get cosmetic surgery on their chest, it might just be diagnosed more often.
Isn’t the relevant statistic how large a fraction of the people you know are trans etc. not how large a fraction of the population?
Anyone want to try and steel-man the bailouts? It’s bizarre how common they are internationally. The far Left will claim it’s “reverse Robin Hood,” but it isn’t really. Corporations and the wealthy will get the benefits; corporations and the wealthy will pay the increased taxes.
The Detroit bailouts in 2009 saved a massive number of jobs, so those at least seemed to be a pretty clear success.
I’m curious, too. There is much talk about providing “liquidity”, which I think means loans and lowered interest rates that will allow businesses to stay afloat. Then there are direct transfers of money – in Norway, the state has decided to pay full wages for people laid off permanently or temporarily, for 20 days, and with somewhat lowered rates after that. These are some major transfers of funds, but what are their effects on the economy in the longer term? Inflation?
This is not Keynes, mind you, spending money to lower unemployment and keep the wheels turning. it’s just a huge transfer of cash while productivity stays low because everybody stays home.
This is an unusual event, and lots of profitable, productive businesses – and possibly entire industries (e.g. airlines) – could go under if they aren’t supported through it. It would be pretty damaging for them all to fold, then have to rebuild them all after the pandemic has passed.
There are organizations known as “banks” whose job it is to provide temporary support in exchange for interest payments later.
Just store the airplanes in hangers. Not much physical capital will need to be rebuilt.
Are banks going to be willing to provide funds at the moment? Presumably their current loans are at risk of not being paid already, whether they’re residential mortgages or commercial loans.
I think you’re understating the amount of work that is required to set up a new airline. There’s more to a company than physical capital.
You’d think so. This is exactly the moment when they are most necessary. If any given bank can’t step up to the plate, well, it should fail. Over the last three decades or so the financial sector has grown faster than the economy as a whole. We can afford to lose some of it.
Yes, there are workers. If they were put out of work, hiring them back will be easy.
The thing is, suppose every airline but one goes bankrupt and is put out of operation.(Two things which I should note are NOT the same thing.) That airline is going to make a fortune. And that explains why you aren’t going to lose “whole industries,” the last airline will get many offers of investment. And it also explains why the second last airline won’t go out of operation, etc. The cost of restarting will fall on the customers, people who use the service, as it should in a market economy.
@Alexander Turok
I haven’t seen anything to suggest that banks are going to do that, although in fairness, the discussion has moved so quickly to bailouts that banks seem to have been left out of the picture entirely. No point in accepting a loan from bank when the government will give you a pile of free money in a week (albeit maybe with some conditions).
Again, I think you’re understating the difficulty of rehiring workers. American Airlines employees 130,000 people. They aren’t all going to sit around twiddling their thumbs if flights are down by 90% for 12 months (or whatever either number ends up being).
I would assume one of the rationales for the bailouts is to avoid that level of disruption.
You’re right that I was implicitly conflating bankruptcy and going out of operation – my mistake. But again this seems like it would be very disruptive. I think the point is to try and avoid that disruption. People who are pro-bailout presumably think the disruption is very (and potentially durably) negative and the costs are fairly low (not in a strict financial sense but that the extra government spending is recoverable or nothing to be concerned about).
Airlines have fun perfectly fine through bankruptcy filing before.
Perhaps a typo, or else I’d be in favor of slightly harsher penalties.
😀
There’s a big difference between bankruptcy (our debts are too onerous but the company is probably still a going concern) and an actual shutdown of demand and/or operations.
Yeah… I am seeing stuff pop up like “Don’t worry if the airlines go bankrupt! It doesn’t mean planes will stop flying – it just means that the management of flying planes will be taken over by more competent people!”
And I’m just wondering, where exactly can we find a group of super-competent-at-running-airlines people that aren’t currently running airlines and who also are going to think that now is a really good time to buy and operate an airline?
@Matt M , In a bankruptcy, it’s the ownership that changes, not the management. The new owners (the creditors, or whomever the creditors sell the company to) can keep the management if they can’t find a more competent one—which is plausible if the bankruptcy is caused by an unforeseen, one-time event.
It’s good if workers find other jobs and don’t just twiddle their thumbs waiting for demand for flights to return.
They prevent a collapse in aggregate demand, which is a bad thing because it causes widespread unemployment. There are in theory better ways to prevent that, like directly sending money to households, but if those are politically impossible, bailouts might be better than liquidations.
I wonder. Like most(?) people, I’m stuck working from home. I go to get groceries once in a while, but that’s about all the spending I do. And as consumers have stopped spending, industry has shut down as well. Handing out money will mean that loans and rents are paid, but not enough to keep production or consumption up.
The bailouts are clearly insufficient for shortages of months or more, but if it’s only two weeks and we can declare “all clear” and resume the economy, the pent up demand could create a boom condition. That’s how we got the Roaring Twenties, after all.
We want to slow down spending. We don’t want stimulus.
In a few months we will probably want stimulus, and lot of it. Right now we have a different problem, maybe best expressed as “how do we put a bunch of things to sleep so they are still useful in a few months.” It’s the opposite of stimulus.
Sending out checks is probably a good idea, because it stops vulnerable people from tipping into temporary disaster. But this is really weird territory.
I do not think that this is right. What is needed is a redirection of spending from some sectors to others.
No they don’t. Even under the completely incorrect Keynesian assumptions they won’t prevent an AD collapse with this type of disruption. Giving the airlines $50 billion dollars is not going to make people decide to fly, and giving households $50 billion is likewise not going to make people decide to fly. Demand is being forced to collapse and no amount of money printing can stop it.
I thought that question was about bailouts in general. Now we have, in addition to demand collapse, also massive supply disruptions, and bailouts are not suited for that.
But if bailout prevents layoffs, it has a stabilizing effect on demand, since presumably people who would be laid off would reduce their spending.
I think it was fairly specifically to the currently proposed bailouts.
Only with a simple model of volatility, where you can squeeze it off in one place without it popping up somewhere else.
Do bailouts prevent layoffs? Or do the airlines take the money, layoff/furlough people and then rehire when (if?) normalcy returns?
@Conrad Honcho
One would hope the money came with strings attached. E.g. you must use this money to pay your employees, so you cannot layoff more than y% of your staff for x months, no dividends or share buybacks for x number of months etc.
Lots of firms are doing “labor hoarding” right now. They don’t need their workers now, but they know (hope) they will need them in a few months, and they don’t want to lose their talent.
I run a small airline in New Zealand. The wage subsidy program here pays $585 per week per employee for 12 weeks. The main strings are:
-Must keep the employee on at at least 80% pay over the duration
-Must see a revenue drop of at least 30% each month over the previous year’s month
This will certainly stop us from laying off pilots in the short term, and there is no way they would find another job in the current market, so they would be on the dole and having to break leases on accommodation.
The whole real estate market is upending where I live, with basically all of the air-bnbs shifting back to long term rentals overnight. It would make an interesting case study I think.
If aggregate demand is measured in nominal terms, which I think it generally is in Keynesian economics, then it can always be increased through inflation.
No Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply are two sides of the same coin, and the dollar value of AD is supposed to reflect the economic capacity and maintaining AD is supposed to prevent the output gap. Maintaining nominal AD is not the goal of Kenesian policy, filling the output gap is.
I don’t want to steel-man the bailouts, but I guess I will….
There were a few posts in my social media feed with comments about ‘Fed bails out banks with $1.5 trillion but we can’t have national healthcare’ which is pretty ridiculous. The Fed is loaning money, against collateral, as hopefully a one off event in a crisis which is very different from committing to spending a huge sum of money year in a year out.
IF you are going to have bailouts, this is the way to do them. Loans against collateral reduce the issues of moral hazard (but not eliminate), they are preferentially better for the companies that were stronger going into the crisis and there is a clear and defined path to normalcy (in theory).
I’ve recently become aware of the existence of something called “glucose tablets” which are apparently basically medically-branded gummy candy for people with low blood sugar issues. My question is, why does such a product need to exist, when such people could simply just eat normal candy instead (or sugar straight from the bag), which based on a quick look, is much cheaper than glucose tablets?
I can imagine a few reasons:
-The tablets presumably are consistently portioned so you know what you’re putting in yourself (but it doesn’t seem too hard to allocate an appropriate portion of your favorite real candy for the same purpose).
-I figure that maybe “literally just candy” doesn’t fit into the qualified expenses for a medical facility, but appropriately medical-looking glucose tablets might, so that’s what medical suppliers order. Also, not everyone likes the same candies, so a medical facility might prefer to keep things simple and just have a generic palatable sugar blob that anyone will be able to eat.
-Maybe people who need a sugar-boost for diagnosed medical reasons find plain candy not sufficiently serious and medical-looking to be a legitimate treatment.
I think it’s a bit of all three of those, especially the first, with the additional reason that glucose is absorbed and usable faster than other forms of sugar, most of which need some postprocessing by your liver and digestive tract before they’re available to the rest of the body. Regular candy is usually either sucrose (which breaks down into glucose and fructose) or a close-to-50/50 mix of glucose and fructose, so it doesn’t give you as immediate a hit of blood sugar as pure glucose.
I think it’s also a convenience issue. There aren’t too many candies that are as portable as those little tubes of glucose.
Sugar, now by prescription: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/
I have no idea if this is the reason, but table sugar and sugar found in most candy is not glucose; it’s sucrose, which is a disaccharide made of half fructose and half glucose. I don’t pretend to understand the details, but the body absorbs and processes them differently, which might make a difference to a diabetic.
Patients are not going to eat too much of generic tablets of glucose where as if they are told to eat candy they are much more likely to eat too much. Most patients will not have this problem but 5% seems resonably likely and large enough that it would be problem.
The tablets are chalk-like. This means they dissolve/break up quickly allowing for a large surface area for absorption. Most soft or hard candy requires chewing which takes time and focus, something in short supply for someone worried about insulin shock. It also means someone is less likely to be able to accidentally choke on them – the tablets will break up quickly. From a physical perspective, sugar cubes are probably just as good in the sense that they are easy to dose, break up quickly, etc.
Sucrose can be broken down for glucose very quickly with sucrase to the point that it doesn’t matter much, though some people don’t produce any so straight glucose is the less-likely-to-fail option. That having been said, sugar in orange juice is the go-to drink in public if needed.
Perhaps if doctors are going to administer/recommend something they want it precise and reliable, even to an unnecessary degree? “Spoonful of sugar” might be a bit sloppy for medical tastes.
I was wondering about infection rates by US State over time and couldn’t find anything to show it to me, so I ended up doing it on my own. Thought folks here might be interested, so here ya go:
https://mavery.shinyapps.io/sars-cov-2-usa-by-state/
It’s up to date with the today’s data per the JHU github repo. If people find this useful/interesting, I might continue to improve it.
Unfortunately, the changes in confirmed infection rate are almost certainly mostly artifacts of increases in test availability.
Is there data anywhere on number of tests performed by state? Apparently in Italy they have that data– I saw an article earlier today saying that we had an early good sign that the Italian lockdown might be working because the percentage of positive test results was trending downward.
https://covidtracking.com/data/
I think the spam filter is eating my post, but this site has that data:
covidtracking .com /data/
I mean, it’d be great to have the true number of cases, but that doesn’t exist anywhere outside of Wuhan (sorta) and the Diamond Princess.
Also, I don’t find it hard to believe that the number of people with SARS-CoV-2 in the US has increased over the past week. It’d frankly be shocking if it hadn’t.
Someone linked a website called “Kaggle” on the Motte subreddit. There are a bunch of COVID datasets. Not sure if someone has done a US state-only one.
https://www.kaggle.com/sudalairajkumar/novel-corona-virus-2019-dataset/kernels?sortBy=voteCount&group=everyone&pageSize=20&datasetId=494724
Corona cooking:
I am trying to reduce the load on the local food system by eating more dried beans.
I have bags of dried red kidney beans and dried black beans. Is there any problem putting them both in a disk to soak overnight? Is there any problem cooking them together? The bags treat it as an ingredient and don’t give cooking times.
I tend to treat red beans and black beans as generally interchangeable, in that I don’t vary my cooking at all when using one or the other, so you should be fine. The main difference is I find red beans are better for sweet dishes and black beans better for savoury, but I’ve also used red for savoury and black for sweet, so it it’s no problem mixing them. Like I said they’re pretty interchangeable.
There’s no need to soak black beans first of all. They cook rapidly anyway. While I suspect a similar effect on thin skinned red kidney beans the age of beans can affect how they cook, fyi, and so that should be the deciding factor regarding soaking.
For home cooking purpose the only risk is uneven cooking, which is a problem I have with beans anyway. Each bean will muddle the others appearance and flavor, but if they’re destined to be eaten together that’s no concern. Very few dishes hinge on the pure expressed essence of two different beans.
More important than anything is salting the water and throwing in onion/garlic/rosemary/something aromatic in the pot while the beans cook. I don’t know who started the don’t salt beans meme but they do not have your best interests at heart. Unless you need to ban sodium for your heart. In which case enjoy bland beans.
Even better than just an onion, is to throw a pound of bacon in with the beans. That basically got me through college.
I always heard the point of soaking red kidney beans was because they are toxic otherwise, by a quick online search it seems to be more “severe food poisoning” than “will kill you ded”:
Seconded on cooking anything with bacon to improve the flavour; the saltiness of the cured bacon (even if you’ve pre-soaked it) will come out with the fat in the boiling water and helps flavour whatever vegetable you cook with it (turnip, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, so on) so you don’t need to salt the water or cook them in stock the way you would if cooking the vegetables on their own.
Pressure cookers can safely cook unsoaked red beans.
Be careful with cooking the kidney beans, especially if you are using a slow-cooker. If not fully cooked they can be toxic.
As far as cooking times: I’ve never tried the black bean/kidney bean combo but we have in my house a bag containing a mixture of 15 (!) types of dried beans. Cooking them all together produced a soup that was delicious but some of the smaller beans disintegrated. As long as you are okay with an inhomogeneous texture you should be okay cooking black and kidney beans together.
Thanks for all the advice. I ended up cooking them separately.
1. Put dried black beans in pot. Cook directly. Done in maybe 90 minutes.
2. Used “fast soak” for dried red kidney beans: boil for 5 minutes, cover and sit for an hour. Then cook. Took about 2, 3 hours.
I tossed a sliced carrot and onion in each, along with a teaspoon of bacon grease. Mixed them together and they are pretty tasty now.
Prepping advice: buy a reserve PC. Mine just broke down so I have to buy a new one in the middle of a lockdown.
Buy used? One guy on craigslist is safer than a crowd, provided he’s not stabby.
I went hunting on a deserted streets of Prague with an improvised hazmat suit and a gun, ready to take on roaming gangs… Oh scratch that, I ordered one from an online retailer, but not to my appartment, since delivery could take a long time in a lockdown conditions (suddenly EVERYONE wants something delivered from on-line retailers), but to one of their shops which they advertise is still open for business, and it should arrive tomorow, hopefully.
Our lockdown is pretty boring, I am afraid.
I made it more interesting by assuming that you had ordered the hazmat suit and/or gun from an online retailer.
Old nerd. I have two working Macs (including my work laptop) of my own, plus my wife has one, plus my wife has an old one (my old one failed) current enough to do most things, plus I have an old Linux machine running, and a tablet with a keyboard. Then there’s all the old obsolete stuff…
I think our family totals seven Macs at least somewhat in use, and several older computers lying around. As I tell my children, redundancy is your friend.
Our Taoiseach has just spoken in a national broadcast about COVID-19. It’s pretty realistic, both calming panic but anticipating that this is a long-term problem.
As of right now, we have 292 cases. He’s anticipating that by the end of the month, that will rise to 15,000 cases and further increases over the months following. This emergency will last into the summer at least. At some time they will ask elderly people and the vulnerable to stay at home (“cocooning”). This will affect things like school exams and will have an effect on the economy – we went into it with a strong economy, the government has made preparations and we’ll get through, but it will have a knock-on effect and it will take years to recover.
Expect the surge to come – things will definitely get worse. Emergency legislation has been signed-off on.
On the other hand, don’t panic, don’t go overboard on social media, continue practicing basic measures, everyone to pull together.
So yeah, not falsely hopeful but not total doom and gloom either. A reasonable effort.
That’s cute, but do they really want to reference the movie where Wilford Brimley and all the other old people got taken away?
I’m pretty sure the aliens in that one had an antiviral panacea, so, maybe?
But at what cost? We must keep in mind the Kabalistic implications of only taking the most “seasoned” among us.
I’m pretty sure you guys have the only Taoiseach…
Who can say, it may turn out like the Pope and the Anti-Pope when we finally get around to establishing a new government!
Seeing how our own and the Côte d’Ivoire flags are always getting confused, you never can tell if some other nations have their own Taoisigh!
The Irish equivalent of Vice President should be the B-seach.
One last survey for the road…anyone have any strong opinions about what is currently the best anti-virus/security software out there at the moment?
My impression is that most antivirus software does more harm than good, so I’d vote for “none”.
Look up Tavis Ormandy’s work if you want some real scares.
True, but this makes the rather high assumption that you know on what not to click. If acymetric needs it for grandma…
For me personally I think you’re right – I haven’t had a real antivirus hit in many years. A few “unwanted programs”, the vast majority of which I installed myself, with maybe a couple adware that went along for the ride and didn’t know about (not much cared, either).
Antivirus software is more important than ever these days, since it’s just a matter of time until the coronavirus infects computers too.
How effective is social distancing my laptop going to be?
It’s safe if you use (finger) condoms.
It should work fine, as long as you’ve downloaded a lot of images of toilet paper and bottled water.
+1, but I’d slightly modify it to “none except Windows Defender which is built-in to Windows 10.”
I work in security for Microsoft, so I might be a bit biased. I’m not on the Defender team though. But in my experience, Defender doesn’t hog system resources as much as other AV products, and also causes fewer compatibility issues. It consistently scores well on industry-standard tests, as well.
I’m less knowledgeable about other platforms, but for mobile devices (iOS, Android) you don’t need any third party software either. Not sure about Mac.
I hear Zinc … oh. Sorry.
The consensus seems to be that if you’re not an expert, windows defender is plenty enough. No fuss, no fee and no ads.
When I want an extra check I do a Malwarebytes sweep, but my info on it being very good is many years old.
Malwarebytes is effective and not too intrusive (unlike some others).
It’s had critical security vulnerabilities in the past. If you’re low risk, installing AV software probably just opens additional security holes in the system.
I can’t post links, but Googling “Tavis Ormandy + [antivirus name]” is a fun exercise.
I am low risk (maybe moderate, I guess), but also have extremely low risk tolerance (as the computer will be used for work purposes, where any compromised data can have legal consequences).
God damn it, I am by nature an anxious and pessimistic person who immediately jumps to worst-case scenarios in my everyday life.
So how the hell did I suddenly turn into the voice of calm and reason and “let’s not panic”?
I think all the COVID-19 scare stories I’m seeing online have burned me out, so seeing yet one more again about something I’d already read about (and evaluated as “eh, too uncertain to say one way or the other on the data so far”) being breathlessly shared on Tumblr has brought out my Inner Mother Figure. (The French recommendation about NSAIDs, if anyone’s interested. Has seemingly morphed into “Take these and DIE FROM COVID-19 EVEN IF YOU’RE YOUNG AND HEALTHY” which is not the originating story at all, and people whom I would have otherwise considered sensible are sharing it like hot cakes).
Or, since I am in no way, shape or form maternal, my Inner Big Sister Figure. Even at this stage, my Inner If I Were A Nun Figure. I really am feeling like Reverend Mother Rosario and her “Girls, girls! You are young ladies, not a herd of elephants! Behave accordingly!” from thirty-plus years ago when I was at school.
Dear general public, stop making me be reasonable, I want to be panicking and running around like a headless chicken in the privacy of my home as I usually would be!
I’m currently optimistic. Not optimistic in the sense of “we can stop our extreme measures” but “our extreme measures will work.”
Every time the idiots do something stupid and congregate at someplace new (the pubs, the beach), the authorities are shutting that place down.
The idiots are giving us an extra 2-4 weeks of being locked down, but they aren’t going to kill us.
Well, there’s the whole economic angle to consider. We can hole up and go through it (though Italy and now Spain show that it’s definitely not a given) but for how long? And at what cost?
What fool would share their hotcakes? Sell, maybe, but share? In this economy?
Once the coronavirus outbreak is tamed and the emergency quarantine procedures are relaxed, what’s to stop the disease from flaring up again?
I can envision the U.S. relaxing its precautions in a few months once the number of cases has dropped, but then having to reimpose the mandatory safety measures because cases start rising again. It would be very disruptive.
The idea is to reduce the prevalence to the point where contact tracing and isolation is effective.
Nah. I mean, that might be the idea, but I hope the governments don’t plan on it. So far the only countries where this seems to work so far are Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan – with China getting there.
In the west with our individualism and respect for crazy people… look at Italy, it’s already worse than Wuhan.
But will we ever be able to get to that point on a global scale if the disease spreads widely and becomes endemic to Africa/Middle East/Other areas that can’t just shutdown and contain it. And once it becomes endemic it’ll probably start mutating into new strains much like the flu.
A scary thought is that the 3rd world (or even first world that can’t contain it) might effectively get cut off from the rest of the world indefinitely due to this virus.
I’ve been wondering about this a lot lately. Is there really any testing to speak of in these countries? Do we have any idea how they are being affected?
> what’s to stop the disease from flaring up again?
Good testing.
If we are really aggressive, you test people on the street, which lets you catch asymptomatic people. We might be aggressive when we start undoing the lockdown.
If we are at “normal” levels of concern, we just test people who have fever symptoms at the hospital.
Run those through mathematical models to say how many cases there are. With low counts, contact tracing is feasible.
Also do checks at borders. How hard these are depends on the entry country’s standards. If Ontario shares its health data with the US, for example, we might only thermal-check every 10th car on the Ambassador Bridge and only corona-test every 100th. For countries with recent breakouts, you hold them in quarantine for N days after arrival, N going up or down depending on how serious it is. The extreme version is no entry.
At some point I expect there will be either a vaccine, a medical treatment, or both.
Sure, but all signs are that that’ll take at least a year. Lockdown measures seem unlikely to be sustainable for that long.
There are a number of existing medications which are suspected to improve Covid19 cases. I presume that they are undergoing trials right now for effectiveness. Given the duration of the disease, we might see useful results in as little as 2 weeks.
The advantage in these cases is that we already have relevant human safety data. They aren’t all harmless. But if shown to be significantly effective in at least the severe cases it might allow the “social distancing” to be stopped much sooner.
I’d bet on the treatment coming first, plus a jump in improvised ICU beds. In which case we can just shrug and go about our business. At least if the treatment is strong enough to prevent the pulmonary fibrosis as well.
It seems like the only way out of this is to plan on implementing something like South Korea’s regime once the initial shutdown has beaten the disease back to a manageable level. In the US I assume that means performing some massive number of tests per day (100,000?) in order to test anyone who has a fever and all the contacts of anyone who tests positive.
Yeah, I wish more people would ask what the end game is. A lot of people are talking about how the testing/tracing will then be manageable, as some said in response to this post, and a lot of very sharp people I follow on twitter are saying. This strikes me as inherently implausible, as does the idea of containment. I understand encouraging staying at home so everyone can see what happens, prepare, reassess, and slow it down somewhat, but we can’t sustain this level of shutdown indefinitely. People are clinging to an idea of god-like control but also not recommending any concrete steps, like social distancing is the most heroic and stressful act we could be called upon to perform. We don’t want to set the bar that low. There seems to be this attitude of either the world ending or us getting through totally unscathed. I see comments along the lines of the fact that even though we were late in containing it, humanity shouldn’t give up, as we can create a vaccine. Since when was humanity giving up on the table? Humanity will do what it always does in pandemics and disasters—get through it, even if it gets a lot uglier than this. But we could lose a lot of people, or just have to deal with major inconvenience. I wish we’d start talking more realistically, or at least admit we have to wait and see, instead of acting like this can be neatly settled. We seem to be really pushing a version of the just world theory here, like it will automatically provide us with the solution we’re owed. I understand the impulse to hope, but we can’t go into denial about the likeliest option: a middle ground between eradication and apocalypse/years in lockdown, one which requires mobilizing and struggling through, which we did as recently as the 1940s and many times before.
The calculation I have not seen is by how much the sort of policies now being implemented, social distancing and many people working from home, reduce the rate of transmission. If we can get it to the point where one infected person transmits to less than one, we have basically won.
Get it to that point, and keep it at that point. If we get to that point by draconian measures that people will insist be lifted as soon as the crisis appears to have peaked, we “win” in about the way the Allies would have won WWII if they returned to a peacetime footing as soon as German bombers stopped appearing over London every night.
We would want to do that region by region, I’m guessing. But doing that requires lots of testing. At what unit of government are tests ordered (like, county or state?) and how do they decide which order to go in?
Each region would want to get off the shutdown as soon as possible, but limited tests mean we can’t all do it at once. And if a region *fails* its test that means we “wasted” a bunch of tests that we could have used to unlock a different region.
I’m at a loss for how to coordinate this. Do we want bidding wars between regions for tests?
There is work on very cheap tests for this happening (That is, a dollar per test) at which point the next move is to manufacture those by the billion and test everyone daily, quarantining the positive cases until the virus is extinct.
@Thomas Jorgensen, good news – $20 tests are now FDA approved and will start shipping next week!
Yeah, my point is that I highly doubt this is feasible in the long-term, and it won’t be solved in the short-term, so it seems we should be using this time to make more practicable preparations for ongoing management. Some people are doing that, but it’s not the main message. Like Scott, I’m wondering about the curious lack of mobilization and silence on certain things.
I think it will naturally become a region-specific thing, as that is the nature of this. So we won’t have to do this all at once, which makes ongoing management more feasible. But, obviously, you won’t be able to contain it totally without imposing draconian domestic measures that I do not think are feasible or worthwhile. I expect national borders to stay more or less closed until we get a better handle on what is going on, which I think is much more doable.
Personally, I don’t think this can be coordinated at the level of effectiveness people seem to be hoping for. I don’t really get all the hope pinned on the testing—are we going to build a little colony for people who are clear to release them into? How long after infection does it take for them to test positive? We know this has a long incubation period, and there’s no safe area. If one infected person gets in to a designated safe area, you have to start from scratch. It just won’t be possible to draw a meaningful line unless you are significantly segregating people away from their families, etc.
A monoclonal antibody that worked against Sars1 has been found to be cross-reactive with Sars2[*] . That means that in 2-4 month production for a passive immunization can be ramping up.
This may buy us a stronger containment to cover the time until effective treatment or active (more permanent) immunization vaccines are available.
[*] Source: Virologist on German NPR podcast(to me, a highly credible source but I have no details on the research.)
ETA: More details.
ETA2:
And the preprint says:
Everybody likes Mr Drosten, I like listening to him, too. Just to offer a different opinion: Some criticise him as not thinking much ahead, thus being too slow to propose more radical shutdown.
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Coronavirus-Warum-Herr-Drosten-jetzt-endlich-schweigen-sollte-4684176.html
And indeed, people keep strolling through town, enjoying the nice weather, and I’m afraid this will end badly.
Policy explanations/justifications are almost always controversial. But re research facts I have not doubts in his competence and integrity.
> keep strolling through town
Is the area dense with people? If not, walking about should be fine as long as people are a few meters away from each other.
Is there any data on partisan responses to COVID-19 that controls for obvious confounders?
Question inspired by this Slate article:
https://slate.com/business/2020/03/democrats-republicans-coronavirus-trump.html
which seems like a terrible analysis because it doesn’t slice by urban/suburban/rural, and of course dense urban cores, places near major international airports etc are both heavily Democratic and places where people have more obvious reasons to take precautions regardless of their politics. Does anybody else’s polling/analysis do better?
Well, Slate itself now has a better analysis which seems to show that even when you adjust for confounders the partisan effect remains:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/polls-republicans-coronavirus-spread.html
Yes, biased source is biased. But this still strikes me as evidence, albeit not decisive evidence, that at the very least, the evo-psych narrative of “right-wingers fear disease more” is wrong. I would also count it as weak evidence in favor of the more CWish theory that right-wingers get systematically worse quality factual information from the media they consume.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import random
import enum
import argparse
import time
class Suit(enum.Enum):
spades = '♠️'
hearts = '♥️'
diamonds = '♦️'
clubs = '♣️'
class Rank(enum.Enum):
one = ' A'
two = ' 2'
three = ' 3'
four = ' 4'
five = ' 5'
six = ' 6'
seven = ' 7'
eight = ' 8'
nine = ' 9'
ten = '10'
jack = ' J'
queen = ' Q'
king = ' K'
class Card:
def __init__(self, suit, rank):
self.suit = suit
self.rank = rank
def __str__(self):
return self.rank.value + self.suit.value
def __repr__(self):
return str(self)
def pinochle():
for _ in range(2):
for suit in (Suit.spades, Suit.hearts, Suit.diamonds, Suit.clubs):
for rank in (Rank.one, Rank.nine, Rank.ten, Rank.jack, Rank.queen, Rank.king):
yield Card(suit, rank)
def get_args():
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument(
'player_number',
metavar='N',
type=int,
help='Your player number. Must be unique. From 1 to 4 inclusive.'
)
parser.add_argument(
'--random-seed',
type=str,
default=int(time.time()) // 900,
help='A random seed. It should be shared between players, but unique '
'between games'
)
return parser.parse_args()
def main(player_number, random_seed):
print(repr(random_seed))
random.seed(random_seed)
deck = list(pinochle())
random.shuffle(deck)
hands = [[], [], [], []]
while deck:
for hand in hands:
hand.append(deck.pop())
for hand in hands:
hand.sort(key=str)
print(hands[player_number - 1])
return 0
def run():
args = get_args()
return main(args.player_number, args.random_seed)
if __name__ == '__main__':
sys.exit(run())
This can be used to have everyone agree on what they’re hands are. Everyone still has to say what cards they’re playing through some other means (and not cheat, and keep track of which cards they’ve played, etc.) but running this would let each player only see their hand while distributing each card in the deck to someone. You can even run it directly on python [dot] org if you want to. Like so:
... print(hands[player_number - 1])
... return 0
...
>>> main(3, 'asdf')
[ 9♠️, 9♥️, 9♦️, 9♦️, A♠️, A♣️, J♦️, Q♣️, Q♣️, Q♥️, 10♥️, 10♦️]
0
>>>
I think that you greatly overestimate what ‘normal people’ can handle.
Fun (?) election thought that occurred to me as a result of my discussions with @meh about the results of the 2020 Presidential election. I was playing with 270towin and the discussion and came up with what happens if Trump wins the four states that @meh pointed out and loses Michigan and Pennsylvania with all other results being the exact same as 2016.
The result is Trump winning 270 electoral votes exactly.
In 2016 there were seven faithless electors. Two Trump electors and five Clinton electors cast their votes for someone besides their pledged candidate.
What happens if in 2020 Trump wins with 270 votes and there are faithless electors?
Scenario 1 is a faithless elector who sends it to the House, scenario 2 is a pair of faithless electors who actually flip the election and elect Biden.
My instinct is that the Congress wouldn’t certify such absurdity, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Democrats will control both houses after 2020.
Don’t get me wrong. Everything about this is wildly implausible, but we live in wildly implausible times.
If it were sent to the house, wouldn’t it be the current Nancy Pelosi House that would decide?
However, it’s not a straight vote. Each state house contingent gets one vote, I thought, so you’d have to break it down to see how the parties stack up in per-state representation.
Thinking about it if it goes “one state, one vote,” there’s way more red states than blue states, so Trump wins the tiebreaker easily. It would take two faithless electors, and as jermo says, that would be…well just insane.
Nope, electoral votes are taken by the new House and Senate (although with the old Vice President presiding over the Senate).
You’re mildly conflating the two votes. The House and Senate vote to certify the results of the electors in a joint meeting. If that certified result does not have a majority, then there is a vote among the election session where each state gets 1 vote.
Currently the Republicans control a majority of House state delegations, but it’s possible that could change after 2020 (although unlikely).
Note that something really silly COULD happen. If the House certifies a result with no majority and then deadlocks 25-25, they have no tiebreaker procedure. However, the Senate does have a tiebreaker, which is the vote of the Vice President. Since the Presidency would be empty, Mike Pence could cast the only vote that matters to elect himself President.
Originally, it was the lame duck house that voted in contingent elections because Congress and the President took office on the same day (March 4). They fixed that in 1933 as part of the 20th Amendment, which moved up the dates for swearing in federal elected offices from March to January. It also staggered the terms slightly, with the new Congress taking office on January 3 and the President and Vice President taking office 2.5 weeks later on January 20. This allows the new Congress time to supervise the lame duck VP’s official counting of electoral vote reports and to hold contingent elections if necessary, with time to spare before Inauguration Day.
Interestingly, the amendment doesn’t seem to specify that it must be the new Congress that supervises vote-counting and holds contingent elections. The date for that is set by statute to January 6 (the third day after the new Congress takes office), so in theory it would be technically constitutional (albeit very poor form) for a lame duck Congress and President to move the date up to before the end of the lame duck session.
I dont know anything about the rules the electors are supposed to follow, but I expect that the 2016 faithless electors knew they could do whatever without changing the result and nobody would care much. In the scenario you describe I expect they would be less cavalier about their responsibility.
And if they did give themselves the power to override the will of the American electorate, may God have mercy on their soul.
Would it be seen that way, especially if Biden wins the popular vote and narrowly loses the EV?
There are already calls to abolish the Electoral College, after all.
Allow me to be consistent and say the average voter wont care about this nuance.
LOL, I’m going to go on a limb and say yes, it would. Maybe not by everyone. But by the overwhelming majority.
It’s one thing to argue the EC is unfair (although I would argue that if you change it, states that entered the union based on the EC should be able to secede). It’s quite another to argue that the results of an election fought with a set of agreed-upon rules is to be overturned because you dont like the results.
Is this all states, or are you referring to a specific set of states that entered based on this?
Is this all states, or are you referring to a specific set of states that entered based on this?
God bless you, you plainly missed all the post-election whinging about the Electoral College which bleated that “it was set up to allow SLAVE HOLDING STATES to have representation” and so forth, so plainly it’s illegitimate and should be abolished.
What I’d like to see is what would happen if Trump won the popular vote and not the electoral college votes. Since the argument was that Hillary should have been president based on popular votes and the EC being an illegitimate and tainted entity, then plainly he should get that second term, right? 🙂
The agreed-upon rules permit faithless electors.
@Deiseach
I was more aiming at states whose present government had some sort of sovereignty outside of the US, versus ones who were created entirely within the US
This is not really possible.
That’s not the argument I heard…. the argument I heard was ‘this is a republic not a democracy’, etc. So clearly the EC elected the correct person, and there is no reason to complain.
I believe you need a majority, not plurality, of electors to win. So in either case, it would go to the house where Trump would likely win, since each state gets one vote.
270 is a majority. 269 is a tie.
right, doh, i was thinking of electors voting for someone not running, like the current batch did.
wait, nm.. i was assuming faithless electors that just went for someone not running… right, if they actually flipped their vote for Biden it would be…. interesting.
There is also the possibility of PA+MI+Nebraska 2nd CD leading to a legit 269 tie. It would again go to the house where Trump would win.
The U.S. Navy gives in to the small but vocal group of people who want the WWII-era battleships recommissioned. The seven remaining ships are fixed up, retrofitted with newer technology, and return to service on the high seas. The timing if fortuitous because the U.S. gets into a war with Russia and China.
If you were an admiral in the Russian or Chinese navies, how would you sink the U.S. battleships, using existing conventional weapons (no nukes)? What tactics and weapon systems would you use, and how many hits would it take to sink each battleship?
https://www.quora.com/What-Battleships-are-still-afloat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ten-Go#Battle
one nuclear submarine could probably take out all 7.
The first question is, what are the battleships doing? As cruise missile launch platforms, they’re now basically a much slower B-1 or B-52, or a destroyer with a much smaller magazine, so I basically just ignore them and do whatever I’m going to do to defend against cruise missile attacks generally. If they’re supposed to be using their big, big guns or their harpoons, they’re going to need to get fairly close to the enemy, and as that enemy I presumably know where my own high-value targets are going to be.
Also, the battleships are presumably going to be sailing with at least a couple of Burke/Tico-class escorts, which will represent most of their actual defense against enemy attack. If they are also sailing in company with a fleet aircraft carrier, the carrier represents most of the offensive power of the task force and the highest-value unit in the task force. That’s unlikely, because the carriers will want to be in a different place than the battleships if they’re both going to do something useful, and the idea of fast battleships screening fleet carriers doesn’t work any more. But the whole idea is daft, so maybe the USN is being forced to do something stupid like that.
So, if they’re with a carrier, I just use whatever doctrine I’m planning to use against a carrier battle group, and bring a little extra ordnance to shoot up the batteship. Then see if I really need to sink a mission-killed battleship.
If they’re not with carrier, then I treat it the same way I’d treat an amphibious group – a big high-value target with some capable escorts and a need to close with me in a fairly predictable manner.
First, track it from a distance. Satellites if I’ve got them, otherwise maritime patrol aircraft or helicopters, maybe submarines with good passive sonar. If the escorts are using their air search radars, ELINT will track them from a distance, if not, they can’t keep my aircraft from shadowing them, but I have to be prepared to loose a few when they play games like pretending to be merchies and then lighting up the radars when my shadow is too close to escape.
Steer my low-value maritime targets, e.g. civilian shipping, away from the battleship group.
When it gets close, ideally I’ll have a diesel-electric submarine lurking in the right place to put a salvo of magnetic torpedoes under her keel. Game over. Nuclear submarines have more operational flexibility, but they’re not that much faster than a battleship group and they make noise at speed, so having them hunt down a battleship fleet on the high seas is going to take numbers nobody really has. But we’ll probably lose one or two Belgrano-style.
If I can’t get submarines in place, large salvoes of anti-ship missiles launched from aircraft, small warships, or mobile land batteries will do the job. Again, same numbers and doctrine that you’d use against an amphibious group, but don’t use sea-skimming terminal attack profiles on the missiles. Pop up and dive will be the order of the day.
If I’m not using torpedoes, this leaves an ironclad barge carrying a payload of burnin scrap metal and maybe some 16″ guns that still work. Presumably the escorts have also been at least mission-killed at this point, so if I really care I can send a squadron of strike aircraft with laser-guided 2000 lb bombs will suffice to finish it. Ideally bunker-busters, but straight HE with delay fuses should be enough if that’s all I’ve got.
How do you know that standard torpedoes and bombs used by Russia and China can penetrate the battleships’ armor? Is there a spec sheet?
the battleships don’t really have underwater armor. they have a torpedo protection system that is designed to absorb torpedo explosions with minimal damage to the ship, sort of like crumple zones on a car. These would likely be relatively ineffective against modern torpedoes, which are designed to explode underneath ships, not run into the sides.
As for bombs above water, you don’t need to sink the ship. the battleship is no good if you’ve used HE to destroy its radars, optics, communications, and other vital systems that can’t be armored and set the whole thing on fire.
Those torpedoes that explode under ships aren’t exactly effective against bigger heavier ships.
The big switch was from battleships to carriers, not torpedo boats or subs, etc.
Also, I don’t think we’ve have good “data” of modern day naval AA vs. modern day aircraft.
I thought the new thing was railguns and other guns that had higher range than aircraft?
Remember that with satellites (assuming they aren’t all/mostly destroyed during the opening hours), there’s no longer the big advantage that carriers had with scouting.
As with subs… I’m not sure how well subs can deal with well equipped anti-sub escorts (what? are you expecting them to fight alone?). Subs were rather cost effective and even modern tests show they still can work, but subs had the highest causality percentages for most sides in WWII.
The ghost of HMS Ark Royal, a twenty-two thousand ton aircraft carrier, sunk by a single torpedo with a magnetic exploder, would like to have a word with you.
Magnetic exploders were adopted, and used even after their early and embarassing failures on both sides of the war, precisely because they were much more effective against large warships. There’d be no reason to bother otherwise; a single torpedo contact hit is going to sink just about any WWII or early Cold War era destroyer, and at least mission-kill a light cruiser.
As far as bombs are concerned, if we pretend a Mark 84 2000-lb bomb is a base-fused high explosive shell of the same gross weight, scaling laws established via extensive testing in the 1920s-1930s and validated by subsequent combat experience suggest it would penetrate about five inches of armor plate. An Iowa-class battleship’s main armor deck is six inches thick, but the modern bomb has a much higher charge-to-mass ratio and more powerful explosives than a 1930s HE shell. If the fuse is properly set to pass through the weather deck and burst on the main deck, it’s probably going to tear through the deck armor (or turret roofs) and send big chunks of steel into the machinery spaces below.
Once all the engines including auxiliary generators and pumps are defunct, leakage will eventually sink the ship even if it isn’t directly holed below the waterline. May take a while, but it will happen. Or it can be run aground to prevent it from sinking, but since we’re assuming the nefarious Yankee battleship is being sent against our shores, hey, free trophy.
How would you drop a Mk 84 bomb on one of the battleships when they’ve been upgraded with modern antiaircraft defenses? They would shoot down the planes if they flew overhead.
Actually, no. The Iowas had no more air defense capability in the 80s than they did in the 50s. Missiles tend to be rather sensitive to blast overpressure, which killed an attempt to give the Iowas Sea Sparrow during the 80s. You’d need to either do really extensive refits for a VLS or delete a turret. Neither is cost effective, even by the dubious standards of the battleship reactivationists.
@John
I’m not sure a Mk 84 would do that. 6″ of steel is a lot to break with a couple hundred pounds of explosive. More likely you’d need BLU-109s, but China and Russia have their equivalents.
@bean
Remember what I said in my original post:
Assume that the battleships have the same air defense capabilities as modern U.S. destroyers or cruisers.
That’s not really an assumption which makes sense, though. You can’t just bolt Aegis onto a ship like that and have it work. There’s physically not enough room to fit all of the electronics if you don’t want them blown apart when you fire the guns. You might be able to make it work by rebuilding the entire superstructure, but if someone was mad enough to tear Iowa apart to do that, then they’d end up with something with approximately the performance of a destroyer or cruiser at many times the cost, and with some vestigial guns that don’t work well in a hot war but take a bunch of weight, space, and manpower. At which point, dealing with it is dealing with an unusually robust modern surface combatant. All the stuff topside is still vulnerable to damage, and it’s not immune to torpedoes.
And this doesn’t even get into the SoDaks, which are incredibly cramped as is, making them much harder to fit such systems to.
When you said “retrofitted with newer technology”, I thought you mean modern electronics and maybe VLS in the aft superstructure. Which is still stupidly expensive, but much less so.
Doesn’t change anything; I’ve already assumed a couple of modern Aegis systems defending the battleship. This is difficult to overcome, but it’s a numbers game – enough missiles, and some will slip through.
And it doesn’t matter if you put a battleship hull under one of the Aegis suites, because too much of the system has to be outside the armor. Nor can you use the bigger battleship hull to put more/better air defenses on the shop, because that’s mostly limited by electromagnetic self-interference.
Once you start getting missiles through the Aegis suite, you rapidly don’t have an Aegis suite any more, reducing the problem to one already solved.
ETA: Ninja’s by bean, of course
Interestingly, I’ve been (very remotely) watching people utterly shatter thick steel plates with high explosives, but that’s with about eight feet of standoff and three feet of packed earth between the HE and the steel, so not the best basis for scaling. Fun, though, even though my role is the cassandra saying “stop, no, don’t do that, that’s not nearly enough steel and/or standoff”.
For a better comparison, Nathan Okun gives the scaling for nose-fused HE (so no great contribution from the shell’s momentum) penetration against RHA as roughly 0.2 calibers. Since the relation of charge mass to shell diameter for battleship-gun HE shells is roughly 0.045 lbs per inch cubed, that suggests the necessary charge weight would be 5.63 pounds times the cube of the armor thickness in inches. So, 1215 lbs of HE to penetrate the Iowa’s deck. A Mark 84’s charge is 945 lbs actual, or 1115 lbs TNT equivalent.
If the Mark 84 punched through the weather deck in one piece and the tail fuze functioned properly, I’d wager the bomb’s momentum would give it the extra few percent of performance it needed to hole the main deck.
My concern there is that we’re well outside the region that even Nathan Okun is going to have data on because nobody made HE shells that big. The US 16″ HC had about 150 lbs of burster, which is about the upper limit for battleship shells. Your 0.2 caliber rule would suggest a 30″ gun to fire an HC shell capable of getting through the deck, and that’s a very long way from anything we have data on. Not to mention that the shell body probably plays a part, particularly at 0.2 calibers, and a 2000 lb bomb is definitely not a 30″ shell, which is going to weigh somewhere in the ballpark of 6 tons.
Not a spec sheet, but a discussion of the various systems and how they work.
It takes exactly four hits to sink a battleship. Everyone knows that.
Ick. That’s a terrible idea.
Pretty much what John said on this. Torpedos are the first choice, and while the TDS on the remaining battleships (excluding Texas) is quite good, it’s not up to stopping a modern heavyweight torpedo. Beyond that, laser-guided bunker-buster bombs. Which, yes, would penetrate the deck pretty well.
I know.
If the virus is worse than expected, people pro strong reaction will say we should have done more, and people anti will say we tanked the economy and it didn’t even do anything.
If it goes better than expected, people pro strong reaction will say our measures worked, and people anti will say we tanked the economy and the virus amounted to not much.
Is Trump’s response a 4-d chess move that lets him claim all positions at once?
Isn’t being able to claim whatever position he wants at whatever time he wants, like, always his move?
Is it any more Trump than previous politicians, though?
Previous politicians would argue what they did was right. This allows me to argue that I didn’t do what you say I did.
While I’m starting top level threads…anyone here have experience with Plantar Fasciitis, and if so was there anything in particular you found especially helpful for treating it (thinking more in terms of “get rid of” than “alleviate symptoms of”?
Yes! I had a really bad case for a while. Gel heel cups (specifically these) made it go away completely for me. I still wear them just in case.
+1 for gel heel cups.
Also gentle massaging the soles.
ETA: If it started with a heel spur, you can prevent relapse with special insoles, basically insoles with gel-filled holes under the heels.
Green superfeet insoles, which I don’t have in all my shoes, but my most used and that cut down on the Plantar Fasciitis considerably. I supplement both MSM and Curcumin for joint and tendon pain generally. MSM is something I notice if I don’t take it for whatever reason. Adding curcumin pushed me from manageable pain to no pain, but I haven’t tried curcumin alone and I’m well aware supplements are voodoo so buyer beware and all that.
Missing my daily curcumin noticeably increases my pain from my various ailments (including plantar fasciitis).
I also use heel a heel cup.
In addition to insoles/gel, rest is about the only thing that worked for me.
Be aware that there are muscle strains that can present like plantar fasciitis. I had one of these (tibialis posterior) strained and none of the usual things (heel cups, braces that keep your feet curved while you sleep) worked for me. Finally went to a physical therapist who gave me a stretching program that did work.
They gave me stretching exercises that helped a lot.
Put both arms out in front of you on a wall, lean toward the wall with one foot 2-3 feet ahead of the other, depending on your height (or whatever you need to feel the stretch in the calf). Forward knee is bent, both feet with heels on the floor, damaged foot in back. Straighten back leg, hold for 15-20 seconds. Then bend back knee, holding heels still on the floor, hold another 15-20 seconds. Switch feet (yes, only one foot is damaged, but you don’t want to develop this on the other side) and repeat with that foot back. Do this a couple more times; do it again later in the day. You are stretching things out in the calf so they aren’t tight enough to pull your foot apart (very rough non-medical terminology). Keep doing it until the problem is gone, and then do it every so often so it doesn’t come back.
Mine hasn’t come back, and that was over a decade ago.
If only, it is definitely both feet for me.
Thanks (and to the other commenters in this thread) for the input/advice so far!
A similar stretch that works well for me is to stand on a stairstep (facing upstairs). Back up four inches so about half your foot including your heel is hanging in the air. Hold the banister so you don’t become unbalanced. Then let the heel drop below the step level, with your leg as straight as you can make it, as far down as you can comfortably do. You should feel a significant stretch in the back of your calf — if you don’t, you might not be keeping the leg straight. Hold this for 20-30 seconds and then raise it back up and rest for a few seconds. Repeat until bored.
Several of the responses have mentioned heel cups, and several the the products I’ve looked at (heel cups and full insoles) talk about relieving heel pain. My pain is primarily in the arch and the ball of my foot, with almost no heel pain. Is anyone else’s experience similar?
This was my experience when I had the looked-like-plantar-fasciitis, turned-out-to-be-tibialis-strain thing.
Checked for splayfoot? Then a support may be necessary.
Had it in 2014 or so, went on a beach vacation, played a bunch of beach volleyball, and noticed when I got back from the vacation it was gone.
It came back in 2017 or so, and I went to the local sand volleyball court and walked laps every couple of days until it went away. It hasn’t returned.
I don’t wear any special shoes or insoles or anything.
Too bad the Outer Banks just closed.
The US essentially has a patchwork response to coronavirus right now, in which various localities are locking down or not based on what mayors and governors decide. In general, this non-uniform response seems like a really bad idea to me. Locked-down areas take a big economic hit to suppress the virus, but of course they can’t keep infected people from adjacent areas out in the long term. That leads to overall ineffectiveness of the suppression strategy in the long term, unless the US sets up internal border checkpoints or something.
You could imagine this working as deliberate curve-flattening strategy in that you could have the less-restrictive areas utilize the hospital capacity of the more-restricted ones. But doing this right would require higher-level coordination which is clearly not happening.
The other way you could imagine this working out well is if treatment options dramatically improve soon, say in a month or two.
What am I missing?
That different places are different and need different solutions? If you’re in BFE and there’s no cases around, locking down tanks whatever economy you’ve got for no benefit.
Given the lack of testing, you don’t know if you’ve got no cases around. If you wait until it’s obvious then you’re two weeks too late.
Also, there’s a nasty free-rider problem here.
Are you asking why the US has responded in the way that it has, or are you asking why a rational actor would choose to respond the way the US has?
I had the thought that the coronavirus outbreak in the Shincheonji church/cult may have indirectly saved many lives. As the first major outbreak outside China, it gave Western observers an idea of how much they needed to worry. When Korea got it under control, it gave Western observers a model for how their own outbreaks could be controlled.
In theory China could have served as the model, but we are naturally skeptical of news from China due to the government’s weak reputation for honesty, and also learnings from a poor dictatorship are easily dismissed as not relevant to wealthy tolerant democracies.
The problem with this theory is that Western countries don’t appear to have either reacted in a timely fashion to the South Korean outbreak, or imitated South Korea’s successful response when they did act.
They reacted badly, but they could have reacted even worse.
(To be clear, I am not trying to excuse Shincheonji, they were criminally irresponsible, but I think it’s interesting how things might have turned out well despite that)
Is there a good place to find out what motherboard my laptop has so that I can figure out what aftermarket upgrades are compatible? The laptop in question is an Acer Aspire 3 A315-41-R98U. RAM is easy enough, but trying to figure out what options are and what costs would be if I wanted to upgrade the CPU, or if a dedicated GPU is supported.
Thanks!
Don’t know if this is any good to you, but this computer magazine review seems to have details on what the components for that model are, and this site seems to have a load of specs.
This seems to be short and sweet about “can I add a dedicated GPU?” “No” 🙂
Thanks! Although the final link (while it may ultimately be correct) is dubious…the response to whether that laptop model supports dedicated GPU’s:
Which is…definitely not a general rule.
The other two links I had seen, but neither appears to give a specific motherboard model #.
Generally speaking, unless you’re using a specially designed upgradeable high-end laptop, it’s *very* difficult to upgrade any component other than RAM. Even if you swap out a CPU that has the same socket, for instance, the heat production might differ and overwhelm the onboard cooling system, or the supplied voltage might not be correct, etc.
People who *do* upgrade anyway are usually people comfortable with tinkering, experimentation, and so on. If you haven’t done overclocking and built a traditional PC before, I would emphatically not recommend trying.
Upgrading to an SSD if you don’t already have one also makes a significant difference.
It comes with an SSD, an also has an open bay if I decided I wanted to install another drive for additional on board storage.
Thanks for the advice, I’m 100% comfortable with those things (and the concerns you raised are partly why I’m looking for more detailed specs so that I can decide what is going to be compatible).
Certainly, RAM is the low hanging fruit for an upgrade and likely where I would start.
Has anyone tried the strategy of deliberately infecting themselves now in the hopes of avoiding queues later, and would want to talk about it?
It seems like it would be hard to find someone who is infected (except in a hospital, where they wouldn’t let you in).
Also seems like it only makes sense if you definitely expect to get it. Otherwise you are trading “maybe I get sick” for “I definitely get sick”.
More precisely, you are trading “maybe I get sick” for “I definitely get sick, maybe twice”.
I’ve had some people ask me about this idea. I think it’s the kind of out-of-the-box thinking I’d normally encourage, but can’t get behind *AT ALL* here. Don’t do this.
1. You won’t really know you’ve got it until you deliberately expose yourself and wait in quarantine for a week or more, and then maybe you don’t show symptoms and still don’t know for sure you’ve got it. And you still have to distance yourself etc. In this case, nothing improves–you were asymptomatic, and you were socially distanced, and you would have been both those things no matter what.
2. You deliberately get it, but actually get something other than Covid-19. Like the really nasty influenza-b that made this past winter a record bad (compared to recent years anyway) flu season in the Northern hemisphere, with newsworthy fatality rates for young and old. Then you get Covid-19 later, thinking yourself immune.
3. You deliberately get it, but actually get infected with flu or a cold as well at the same time. Disease-related inflammation makes your body weaker sooner, and you doubled up. Plus extra infections all at once can’t help your odds of dodging needing care or a bad care outcome.
4. You deliberately get it, but time it very badly because you didn’t understand that many of the people who need care need care for weeks, not days. If you weren’t going to need that kind of care, especially if you could self-treat at home, it didn’t matter when you got it, but if you are going to need that kind of care, it is already too late for getting Covid to be anything but a very bad idea.
5. You deliberately get it, but it turns out you’re one of the people (including some young people) who get lasting reductions in lung capacity and significant organ damage when you could have *not* had those things. One Korean study I saw (sample size of like 15 tho) took people who checked in and were confirmed Covid cases, and said 1/3 had lung capacity a month later that was reduced by 30%, also 1/3 had significant organ damage. I think that’s obviously going to be not-that-helpful at guessing the true rate of this kind of lasting damage, but it’s pretty scary.
6. Your attempt to get yourself infected involves traveling to a nearby friend or clinic. You didn’t know it, but you were already infected, and this traveling means you become a vector by way of a gas station attendant or a police officer who stopped your car or whatever, and that person continues to spread it, and then the larger-than-otherwise spike kills people you care about and further harms the economy and well being of the country in which you live.
I think the net result of these possibilities adds to a very small set of possible worlds where deliberately exposing yourself to sick people makes you better off, and a much larger set of possible worlds where this is a bad or even very, very bad choice. The likelihood of mistiming the outbreak or ending up as a vector are the biggest ones though.
The time to do this was a month or two ago.
This strategy would be a lot more effective if we had serological tests available so that one could confirm that one had antibodies to the virus but not the virus itself, thus establishing safety and immunity. From the giant Wired article on testing:
https://www.wired.com/story/everything-you-need-to-know-about-coronavirus-testing/
it sounds like this is feasible but at least weeks, more likely months, from being ready.
And in today’s COVID-19 news from Ireland (north and south), my 20 year old nephew probably has it. He was attending UCG (University College Galway) and a couple of weeks ago they were told to stay home and work online; he saw an ambulance on campus and a section got deep-cleaned, so everyone suspected there was a case. That’s where he probably picked it up.
He went home and now today his mother has told me he has a fever of 40°C (104°F) and is coughing, so they’re self-isolating. I told her to ring the helpline and get him tested and they’ll want to know his contacts. He’s young and has no underlying conditions so he should be okay (but God knows); my sister and brother-in-law are in the 50+ age range with no underlying physical problems (although my sister was very sickly as a child, had pneumonia as an infant, and has weakened lungs ever since) so they should be okay if at slightly greater risk. His father’s mother, though, is elderly and frail so if he’s been in contact with Granny and passed it on when he was infectious but not showing any signs – yeah, that’s worrying.
And this is why they should have closed the universities down sooner. But at least our side have done it, I don’t know why the Nordies are being so stubborn about it but whatever.
In religion-related news, my sister is living in a very Orange part of the North and she tells me the local “crazy Jesus people” are saying that COVID-19 is God’s will for preventing the Fenian parades (i.e. the cancellation of St Patrick’s Day celebration) (insert eye-rolling by yours truly here). Remember this heroic virtue the next time you read me ecumenically defending any Reformed-tinged denomination 🙂
For the Catholic response, here’s St Patrick taking on his next job after driving out the snakes!
Right, time to dig out that novena to Archangel Raphael and start saying it on behalf of the nephew and good luck to you all – stay safe and socially distant!
Sorry to learn that @Deiseach, best wishes for a recovery.
My wife and son’s have the sniffles, but without a test it’s hard to tell if allergies, cold, or Wuhan.
We can only wait.
Thanks for the good wishes, Plumber. Yeah, it doesn’t help that this is colds’n’flu season anyway, because now any kind of cough/runny nose/fever immediately makes you jump to OH NO I’VE GOT THE LURGY!!!!
Do urge them to talk to the doctor — 40 C is no laughing matter, in an adult, and there might always be something else wrong with him.
FWIW, I would go to the hospital if I had a 104 degree fever.
FWIW, I would go to the hospital if I had a 104 degree fever.
Down here they’re recommending not going directly to the hospital (in order to keep transmission down as much as possible and not clog up A&E with a lot of people who may or may not have the virus as distinct from normal colds and flu):
He’s up in the Wee North right now so I’m not sure what the advice is there; this seems to be what’s up so far:
It at least call ahead so that they can get you without letting you near the others.
All of these other responses seem like total overkill to me — just make a discord bot that lets you deal cards.
This one is open source, and looks like it could be a good starting point for a pinochle deck.
List people with Captain Obvious names, e.g.
King Guy (as opposed to the much rarer King Gal or Queen Guy)
Dr. Corona leading coronavirus response in Indonesia. I can’t tell if this means Indonesia is a shoe-in to beat the virus, or this is an obvious double-agent.
Neither, he’s just an alcoholic.
None of the above; he’s the lost heir to the Spanish throne.
Have a third party shuffle and deal cards in their own home, and email the cards each player has to each player privately.
Showing each person’s play in real time is harder, but couldn’t they use some sort of text notation in a chat server, instead of displaying cards visually? (The way chess can be done with just text notations)
Unreal Engine is free and easy. It uses a visual scripting system that requires no real coding experience but it’s pretty powerful and flexible nonetheless. It is normally used for pretty 3d games but will work for 2d games fine. Network functionality is mostly built in, though the game logic needs to accommodate it.
That’s still way more than 2 hours of work if you start from scratch (especially if you’ve never done anything similar before).
Tabletop simulator?
Extending a bit: Tabletop simulator is a “game” on steam that lets you simulate playing a huge variety of boardgames. It’s not free (about €15,-) and each player has to buy it separately, but it’s probably the most hassle free version of what you are looking for.
It also looks like somebody already made a pinochle deck for it.
Trying this again because apparently my last got eaten. Maybe the link was too much?
I am following the US cases on worldometers coronavirus tracker, and we have 93 deaths and 4748 cases, but only 12 cases in serious or critical condition. This seems wildly low to me, which makes me wonder what is going on.
I understand that our testing is behind and our true number of cases is almost certainly higher than ~5000, but “in a hospital for COVID-19” is pretty easy to detect, so I would expect this to be even more accurate. Are we counting them differently, or are we just only having people come into the hospital briefly to die?
Given that testing is behind, and the general state of our healthcare system for people in the lower classes, then it makes sense that people wary about the costs of going to the hospital aren’t going until things get fatally bad, and don’t find out that it’s COVID-19 until that point.
It may also be the case that, given the shortage of testing resources, they’re just treating people with really obvious symptoms (serious or critical condition) without wasting a test on them.
It would be bizarre to have someone in an ICU on a ventilator and not test them for coronavirus, although I guess maybe you’d isolate them either way.
If the tests are really in that short a supply, though, we should see a jump in the critical condition numbers as the new tests come on line in the next week or so.
I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but getting results back from tests was taking as long as ~4 days in some case. (1 day to get them back from the state, and then if that was positive, another 2-3 days to get confirmation from the CDC, which would presumably be required to be included in the stats.)
I would say that there is about a close approximation of zero chance that the ‘general state of our healthcare system’ is causing enough people to not go to the hospital in the middle of a pandemic panic to explain the kind of numbers EchoChaos is talking about.
People forget, in the middle of all the election season rhetoric, that something like 75% of Americans are perfectly satisfied with the insurance coverage they have. The current health system worries focus on a (large and worrying, of course) minority of people with no or in-adequate coverage.
Not just that, but my understanding is that (for people with insurance) it’s easier to get in and see a doctor in the US than in most European countries, so if anything, I would expect more Americans to be seeing a doctor, not fewer.
Well, depends on your insurance. I have insurance, but as it is a high-deductible plan if I go to the doctor for a diagnosis for cold/flu/COVID symptoms I will be paying for that visit out of pocket, likely in the $150-$350 range. Hopefully I’m paying for it with the money I’ve been putting into my HSA, but not everyone is doing that.
I reported before that my million-person-county only had 3 tests.
They say they have enough tests, now. My MIL is taking my niece to get tested because niece self-reported an old fever (at the start of the month) to her OB-GYN (that visit was today). Which sounds like an incredibly lame reason to test, but it indicates to me that we have swung rapidly away from the crazy situation where you need a note from the Pope to get tested.
Is the test likely to catch a month-old infection?
Follow-up on niece.
As background, she is a compulsive liar. I should have mentioned that.
Her grandmother took her to the testing facility, where they stayed in their car. They got a number, were told to wait, and then later to drive to a certain spot in the parking lot. A nurse came up, diagnosed niece’s symptoms, dithered on a test, and then niece ginned up her memory of her old symptoms enough to get a test.
So now her whole household is on quarantine for a few days while waiting for the test. Her grandmother (my MIL) is a vulnerable population so we’re pissed moderately annoyed that niece may have exposed her. (Niece had been staying with her boyfriend until her story to her OB-GYN caused niece to need a ride to the testing clinic.)
OK, but that’s the lower classes, which is less than half the population – and the half which has spent the least amount of time visiting China or Italy or hanging out with people who have, which probably still matters a bit.
Most Americans have health insurance good enough that the “cost” of going to a hospital ER is dominated by the personal hassle of an ER visit, not the dollar copay. Most isn’t nearly all, but that only gets you maybe a factor of two discrepancy between US death:critical rates compared to the EU. It looks like you’re seeing something much more than that.
Which probably means you’re seeing a reporting issue, with most of the critical cases not being explicitly reported and aggregated into whatever COVID-19 total you are looking at.
Less smoking, maybe? MERS is pretty similar, and the primary risk factors for it are diabetes, heart disease, and smoking. Also, exposure to dromedary camels.
Could definitely explain the lower combined severe and death rate, but why would our ratio of severe to dead be so wildly different than other countries?
Most are seeing lots of severe cases which is causing ICU stress, which is the major risk people are talking about. We are seeing virtually none.
I think @AG’s answer is probably the one with the most explanatory power – that a lot of people with poor health insurance aren’t going to go to the hospital unless they absolutely have to. Lower smoking rates might just be making some of the severe cases marginally less severe, which results in less people seeking medical assistance, even if they might still need it. I would’ve thought that higher diabetes rates in the US would make up the difference, but it looks like China, at least, has about the same diabetes rate as the US.
My assumption is that the information is being aggregated from many sources, most of which are not listing cases in serious condition at all, whether or not they exist, so the number (12) is just meaningless.
+1!
You can try to extrapolate from the data at https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/, specifically the U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network. The recent uptick in the data is not without precedent, but they note “Clinical laboratories in regions 2 and 10 reported a decrease in influenza virus circulation; however, these are areas of the country where COVID-19 is most prevalent and more people may be seeking care for respiratory illness than usual at this time.”
It’s probably a reporting issue. But since people tend to associate with others of similar age, you could also imagine situations where the virus’s initial spread in Italy was among an older subset of the population while the initial spread in the US was among a younger subset.
One other thing that came up was that a full third of American deaths so far are in a single nursing home in Washington where the patients really didn’t get any ICU. They just caught COVID-19 and crashed out.
Perhaps that’s the modal American death, so there are very few in serious condition because Americans either get mild cases or outright die.
What are the best places to learn about coronavirus? Ideally, I’m looking for explainer blogs that go in-depth and offer opinions, like a SSC or Gwern. Do you know any blogs, publications, researchers, Tweeters, etc.?
More broadly, what are the best sources on biosecurity and pandemics?
https://cvdailyupdates.com/
I follow Scott Gottlieb on twitter, but he’s mostly current updates, not in-depth explainers. He does re-post his press appearances, but that’s still a long way from the Gwern level.
TWIV is a very high-quality podcast by a group of academic virologists, with several episodes devoted to COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2.
Down the thread, I posted a really good slide deck that I believe addresses the questions you’re asking about.
There’s also this post on Medium, which goes into more depth.
I want to second the Medium article. Its a bit alarmist, but the best article I’ve read to date.
Does anyone know a good platform to create a closed group for my son and his friends from 2nd grade, to share pictures etc with school closed. Some kind of controlled social media?
Discord?
Discord is probably a better option, but I’ve also heard people using private subreddits for this purpose, though (having not looked into it) I suspect it requires a bit more tech savvy-ness.
Thanks, Forgive my ignorance but from what I have read Discord is not recommended for kids and is for 13 and up.
Are the 2nd grade kids going to be the ones actually using the app, or are you just going to be showing them stuff on it?
My impression is that this is more a supervision/oversight issue than a technical issue. Discord does not, afaik, have built in parental guidance tools.
I have no issues with my children using Discord with occasional review by me.
The internet is illegal for children under 13. This is nothing special about Discord.
…/s?
What does that mean? Lots of children under 13 use the internet.
Not sarcasm, slight exaggeration. COPPA makes it so onerous to run a website used by children under 13 that most don’t bother trying to comply and just ban kids entirely.
And by “ban” I mean kids have to lie about their ages or claim to have parental permission in order to go online. Everyone knows it’s impossible to enforce, but we keep pretending.
@BBA
The nicest thing about turning 18 is that I could stop lying about my age!
There are a variety of laws that make it very hard to get advertising money and comply with the law if you knowingly allow children under 13 to access the site.
So most social media bans children under 13, but doesn’t enforce the ban too hard (they’ll shred accounts if someone reports them, but won’t look at the account otherwise).
The loophole is to claim that the parents are making and running the account.
You’ll likely find that restriction on any site not dedicated to kids, which will likely be pretty limited.
@BBA”
Judging by the wiki piece you linked to, the restrictions only apply to a web site that collects personal information from children. My site collects no personal information from anyone, and I don’t think I have to do anything at all to comply with the law.
Following on the comment by Business Analyst, YouTube got into a lot of trouble last year for this and had to pay a large fine. Then they caused a lot of confusion and dismay among their contact providers by trying shunt the responsibility for this onto the channels. To be sure, their alternative would have been a huge cut in advertising revenue. (Which all of the channels that post videos for children are going to have anyway.)
Creating a private subreddit is easy, but there are mild restrictions on who can do it. In particular, you need someone with at least a 30 day old account.
If they are concerned about age-appropriateness, reddit seems a much worse option than Discord.
Yeah. Plenty of age-inappropriate content on both, but I suspect it’s more discoverable on Reddit.
Usually used for baby photos, but maybe Lifecake.
Pick any social media platform they’re not on yet, have them create accounts, friend each other, and then set all display settings to friends-only for all accounts.
Let’s talk about one of the odder cards from the MtG expansion “Theros: Beyond Death”: Skola Gravedancer. That’s a 2/2 with these abilities:
Spending three mana to gain, on average, 17/40 of a point of life sounds like a terrible deal, so I suppose this card is supposed to pair with some other card that mills you, like Acolyte of Affliction or maybe Devourer of Memory. It’s still not gaining you much, though.
Is Skola just a bad card?
Just looking at draft: It’s also a 2/2 enchantment creature, that triggers constellation. There are worse things to be had for 2 mana…
Other formats: it would synergize with fetchlands a bit?
Commander: Maybe put it in a deck that has Forgotten Harvest and similar effects.
A 2/2 for 2 mana with two weak abilities isn’t bad.
Milling yourself is useful in green/ black decks that can get stuff out of the graveyard. I have a fun older green black casual deck based around Oversold Cemetery and other “bring creatures back from the dead” cards that could use that, especially since it’s a creature as well. The ability is expensive but it doesn’t require tapping so whenever you have mana left at the end of your opponent’s turn you can just dump it all in to that ability.
Gravedancer is a common, and like most commons it’s targeted strictly at limited. In limited, a 2/2 for 2 does not need much upside to be a reasonable card, and the three smallish upsides of Gravedancer taken together certainly get there. It’s a cheap enabler for Constellation, and an expensive but still real one for Escape, which also produces minor upside in conjunction with the other Escape enablers that are likely to be in your green deck. Don’t think about it as spending 2G to gain .425 life; think about it as spending three mana to draw a quarter of an Escaped Voracious Typhon or a third of a Pharika’s Spawn. And yes, occasionally that extra point or two of life over a game will be the difference in a tight race.
But you should not be putting it in your constructed deck, unless it’s part of some whacky combo where you mill the whole deck and kill with Aetherflux Reservoir or something.
Looking at it: it’s a fine card for limited already, being a bear (a 2/2 for 2 mana). In the context of Theros Beyond Death, it’s also got two-and-a-bit synergies:
* It’s an Enchantment, so it triggers Constellation, one of the major set mechanics
* It puts cards in your graveyard, allowing you to use Escape, one of the other major set mechanics
* Much more dubiously, Heliod, Sun-Crowned wants cards that can gain you life.
I think it’s mainly intended to pair with the green card that mills you… Relentless Pursuit, that’s the one. If you have a few of each, you can expect to gain maybe 2 or 3 life for free while doing things you already wanted to do (playing creatures and drawing lands). It also pairs well with Oread of Mountain’s Blaze, since you’re likely to discard land cards in the late game when you don’t need them.
All of that said, its upsides aren’t that big, and it’s never going to be a high-impact or key card.
In terms of Limited (draft or sealed deck play), it’s probably around a 2/5: good filler for a draft deck, but won’t always make it. In terms of Constructed play, it’s almost certainly never going to be played, barring some kind of sweet combo being discovered with it. You might see it in an EDH/Commander deck that runs Crucible of Worlds to recur Wasteland, or something similar.
I don’t think it’s a great card, but I am trying it in my (middling power) cube, because it has synergy with graveyards, enchantments, and life gain, three archetypes green is involved in, similar to the limited environment as fortyCakes describes.
You also might kinda of want it in a Gitrog Monster edh deck, but I’m sure you could find a lot better.
I think the card is pretty good. A 2/2 for 2 doesn’t need much. With the escape mechanic, milling 3 or 4 cards is practically draw a card. This card does it slowly, but this format seems prone to long grindy games and having a place to dump your mana for value in the late game is useful.
It’s a common. Limited fodder grizzle bear with small upside, possibly enabling graveyard synergy while still being a bear. That’s all. (Maybe fringe playable as an anti-aggro sideboard card in some kind of dredge deck.)
But yeah, most commons are just filler trash.
In limited its a pretty competitive 2 drop, especially for a common. Not the best, but certainly playable in green (and very playable in green white enchantment decks).
In standard I’ve only seen it used in a few Nissa ramp decks designed to get a bunch of lands out, use a few to block early, and then power up an explosion/hydroid krassis with a nyxbloom ancient and the aforementioned lands. It’s purpose there is to boost the value of the lands that serve to stall the opponent.
It’s effective enough unless the opponent gets the planeswalker that stops extra draws, as that’s the focus of its ramping.
People in the Netherlands are now talking about needing 50-60% of people to have had COVID-19 for herd immunity to arise.
That seems implausibly low to me (according to the table in the 2018 adversarial collaboration entry on vaccines, it would put it below everything except Hepatitis B). Thoughts?
It’s the same as in the UK, also from respectable government scientists, and I’ve not seen it disputed. It’s based on Rate of Infection, and basically how many people you need to stop a virus spreading through the entire population, so it wont stop isolated breakouts (say communities that missed it first time) just stop it spreading.
And coronavirus is not really contagious compared to things like measles. Its not particularly airborne for a start, relying on water droplets. It may also suffer in warm conditions.
It’s infectious, but not that infectious. The estimates I’ve seen for its R0 in an unprotected population are something just north of 2. Simplifying, if the natural R0 is 2 but the population is >50% immune, the effective R0 is <1, and an outbreak won’t grow.
From the Babylon Bee (originally a Christian version of the Onion; now just as much a US-political-conservative version): “Nation’s Nerds Wake Up In Utopia Where Everyone Stays Inside, Sports Are Canceled, Social Interaction Forbidden.”
I’m not surprised to learn that a website like this exists, but I’d never thought about it before. Feels pretty surreal.
The Bee is loads of fun. Some other fun recent headlines from there:
Man Who Gets Coronavirus Relieved He can Finally Touch His Face All He Wants
Prominent Italian Doctor Suggests Throwing Pills at Coronavirus
Drug Cartels Switch to Producing Hand Santizer
Biden to Defy CDC Warning to Stop Touching Other People’s Faces
I got into it mainly for the Christian-related fun stuff (Coronavirus Passes Over Houses with Chick-Fil-A sauce smeared on Door Posts), but it does have a good bit of more generic political stuff. That gets a bit tiresome for me, but it isn’t too bad. It helps that they are not fans of Trump.
There’s also a Catholic satire counterpart, The Eye of the Tiber.
Babylon Bee is more reliably amusing to me and Tiber is borderline-defunct now, but there were a few good ones, like “Trump says ‘Before Washington was, I AM'” getting theologically-tinged punches in at both sides.
I think my favorite from Eye of the Tiber was “Peter Jackson Announces Plans for 72-Part Movie Series of The Silmarillion.”
But all the comic book conventions are cancelled!
And how can I see my comic book movies????
You go to conventions and/or the theater?
OK normie
So, consolidated Covid predictions thread.
Here’s your chance to show your range and your confidence levels in one easy place where you can explain later to all your SSC buddies how you got it right and they were all wrong.
My entry:
1K – 50K deaths in the U.S. by the end of the year, confidence level 75%. So, as I mentioned before, worse case is likely a bad flu season’s worth.
If you disagree, state your prediction. Bonus accuracy bragging points for smaller ranges.
150K-250K deaths in the U.S. by the end of the year, confidence level 60%.
Back in January I took the under on H1N1, which was estimated to be between 151,700 to 575,400 deaths, and I’m sticking with that. I’d say 70% confidence for the low number, and 95% for the high.
That’s a global number, so is your corona prediction global?
(so many people on this thread aren’t clear on that!)
Yes, I was thinking globally. In the US, my numbers would be something like:
<5,000 – 70%
<20,000 – 95%
More than 250.000 deaths (75%). See also here: https://predictionbook.com/predictions/198506
Let me try to upper-bound this.
In 1918, the Spanish Flu killed 675,000 Americans from a population of 103 million. The US currently has 327 million people. So if COVID-19 were as bad as the Spanish Flu, it would kill 2.1 million.
Spanish Flu was a whole lot more deadly than COVID-19; in particular, COVID-19 mostly kills the elderly, whereas Spanish Flu killed people of every age.
On the other hand, our population is more than 3 times denser than it was in 1918. (And a lot more connected in ways that are hard to quantify.)
Which is why this kind of pandemics are here to stay. Until we learn to build vaccines and treatments on the fly.
Or we adopt behaviors that make this sort of diseases a lot less likely or a lot less likely to spread.
Are SARS, MERS, and now COVID-19 all believed to have been spread from wild animals to humans?
MERS is believed to have spread from domesticated animals (camels). SARS from bats to civets, though I’m not sure if the civets were farmed or wild-caught. I believe most novel flu strains come through domesticated animals.
If we want to reduce the incidence of novel wild animal–human transmission, would closing/aggressively suppressing all those wild animal markets help?
Well, sure, the first thing to do is limit contact between humans and wild animals. Not necessarily in a drastic “let’s kill them all” fashion, but more like “wild animal markets=a new virus per decade”.
But the fundamental problem is the one I remember from Guns Germs and Steel – population density and size breed pathogens. If you consider viruses that can potentially infect humans, only a few may be viral enough to survive in a population of hunter gatherer tribes that don’t have contact between them for months. But in the modern world with a culture of “we beat disease” and transatlantic flights… even a stupidly helpless virus that can only hope to infect the 1% with a specific gene complex and gives perfect immunity afterwards, can still survive. So you have a much much higher potential pool of pathogens.
So do you have a prediction? Or just an upper bound?
Just the upper bound.
80% on a vaccine being tested in the field by the end of the year. Testing that targets populations likely to get Covid and intends to measure infection rates counts (i.e. blind testing on 1000 health workers in Italy). 90% on 12 months from now. 60% on 6 months.
There are too many optimization shortcuts that can be taken in a truly serious situation for this not to happen. Some are money, some regulatory, and some are just people doing their best to help.
What counts as “tested in the field”? They’ve started testing one candidate vaccine on volunteers yesterday.
I should up my numbers. Last I heard, they were ready for phase 1. Apparently from “ready” to sticking needles in people takes less than a day these days.
I mean with the intention to actually be useful, aka protect people.
I would expect the U.S. to be slow to approve a vaccine, given the general regulatory attitude to such things. But once there is what looks like a workable vaccine, I would expect some other countries, such as Iran, which isn’t likely to take U.S. regulatory rules very seriously, to deploy it pretty fast. And once that happens and isn’t a catastrophe, it’s hard to see U.S. regulators holding out very long against the pressure to adopt it.
Also, I’ve seen a number of news stories claiming that a known malaria medicine is reasonably effective against Covid-13. If that turns out to be true, it could pretty sharply reduce mortality figures and length of hospitalization.
@DavidFriedman
The Chinese just released a study saying an existing antiviral is (somewhat) effective as well.
Things are moving very fast. There is a delay of a few months before it all actually starts being used, but there’s a good change several things will hit the shelves at more or less the same time and make a big difference.
If the hospitals were swamped today, the bottleneck would be workers trained to safely use ventilators.
“U.S. acute care hospitals are estimated to own approximately 62,000 full-featured mechanical ventilators.”
“The addition of older hospital ventilators, SNS ventilators, and anesthesia machines increases the absolute number of ventilators to possibly above 200,000 units. Many of the additional and older ventilators, however, may not be capable of adequately supporting patients with severe acute respiratory failure. Supplies for these ventilators may also not be available due to interruptions in the international supply chain. Moreover, an analysis of the literature suggests that U.S. hospitals could absorb between 26,000 and 56,000 additional ventilators at the peak of a national pandemic, as safe use of ventilators requires trained personnel.”
So initially we’d only be able to save the lives of <116,000 people who need mechanical ventilation to survive at a time. What percentage of active cases is that?
In Italy, 8% of cases are Serious or Critical.
So if 80% of cases just need to stay home and get over a bad cold, 12% require hospitalization but not ventilation, and 8% ventilation (and their ICU stay will average 15-16 days), we should be able to handle 1.45 million infections at a time before the preventable deaths start?
Right now, we’re at 4,482 confirmed cases and 86 deaths, a 2% death rate without the hospitals filling up. The problem is our abysmal testing: if 322 people are carrying the virus for each one who’s tested positive, we’re about to hit a 15-day period where hospitals are slightly overwhelmed.
Another metric: if things get as bad as Italy, we’ll see a day where 368 * ~5.33 people die, or 1,961. If we hit that number but it doesn’t get exponentially worse, it would take about two months to lose 100,000 people.
So what’s your prediction on deaths at the end of the year?
There are certainly lots of “ifs” out there, contributing to wide ranges and low confidence levels, but what is yours?
A lot depends on how we act and on unknown factors about the disease, so I think there’s a fairly wide range of possibilities. I would put it between 50,000- 400,000 but even with that wide range I only have about a 60% confidence in it; it wouldn’t surprise me that much if it’s as low as 25,000 or as high as 1,000,000 so I guess if I had to make a 90% confidence range that would be it.
In my personal prediction app from 2 weeks ago:
1) Someone I personally know gets COVID-19 (70%)
2) Corona panic is mostly gone from the Netherlands by ascension day (21st of May), with mostly gone being defined as no extraordinary measures being taken by the majority of the population. (70%)
3) I will not self-quarantine ahead of any government regulations (90%)
I was right on 3 and would now estimate 1) at a much higher percentage (probably >95%) and 2) at a much lower percentage (<50% for sure)
I agree with the sentiment, but I’m a little less confident; I’d say 1k — 75k deaths, 60% confident.
1) Asymptomatic cases are looking more and more to be a significant force. Bad for spread, but (provided no immunity oddities) great for building an immune population.
2) I still do believe in the seasonality effects. As far as I can tell, Japan has had disease growth of 5-12% per day, a bit off of the 30-40% that most of the rest of the world exhibits, with (as far as I can tell) really quite limited social distancing. Despite being the most sparsely populated part of Japan, the largest cluster is in Hokkaido (the cold, snowy, northern island).
But the rest of Japan is cold in February as well, for Tokyo 6°C (48.2°F).
It is absolutely a mystery to me why Japan is *not* an absolute disaster right now. High density, limited social distancing, lots of early cases, (presumably) week contact tracing due to limited testing, very old population etc.
I think you’re right: 1K – 50K sounds right to me. Heck, I’ll narrow it further: 1K-30K.
OK, late but it took a while to do math I can at all trust. BLUF: I’m predicting 20,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States this spring and summer, but with an 80% confidence interval of 1,400 to 300,000. Best I can do with the data available, and note that the median number is roughly equal to a bad winter flu season. Which means the net death toll could be negative, as the same countermeasures we’re using against the coronavirus will also protect against the flu.
Now for the math:
South Korea is the first developed nation to reverse (not “flatten”) the curve on COVID-19, with a steady decaying exponential at -0.155/day. And the measures they took when their outbreak took off on ~20 February, look an awful lot like what the US finally got around to roughly this weekend.
Best plausible case, the ratio of actual vs. reported cases in the US is no worse than it was in the ROK a month ago, and the US response starting yesterday is as effective as the ROK response starting 20 February. Extrapolating from the ROK experience, that would give us 140,000 total clinically reported case and, at an optimistic 1% mortality, 1400 deaths.
Worst plausible case, it takes an extra two weeks of fiddling before the US countermeasures reach ROK-effective levels, Then, after another three weeks and with the new-infection rate down a factor of two from the peak, we declare victory and do remove all countermeasures for two weeks before saying “oops, that was stupid”. Except, the effective US response is mostly at the state level, and it won’t be that neatly synchronized – so probably no more than half the states will do the really stupid thing while the other half watch to see how it turns out. If at that point we finally get it right, and even the United States usually doesn’t take more than three tries to get it right, then we see ten million infections and probably closer to 3% mortality due to overtaxed hospitals, so three hundred thousand deaths.
Geometric mean of those two is just over 20,000 deaths.
weren’t they testing at a very high rate?
February 20th was when they realized the virus had been spreading unchecked among members of the reclusive Shincheonji cult. Whatever testing they had been doing up to that point, wasn’t testing the right people.
You guys are still being way too optimistic.
The US and UK both just drastically changed direction based partly on an epidemiological study London’s Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, which is advising the British government.
A CNN summary is here: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/health/coronavirus-uk-model-study/index.html
The actual report is here:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
The short version is – if the US and UK do nothing, they estimate about 250k deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the US. Mitigation strategies to slow the spread, but short of total nationwide lockdown, cut that in half. The only strategy they project to result in only tens of thousands of deaths is total social distancing lockdown until a vaccine can be deployed- ie, keep this up for 18 or so months.
So what’s your specific prediction for U.S. deaths by the end of the year? Got a range and a confidence level?
The request is to please go on the record with what you think, rather than solely pointing to other’s opinions.
No idea, because it’s a range from 10k-2mil, based largely on what the Trump administration does. And nobody knows what the Trump administration is going to do, including the Trump administration.
Yeah, it seems likely that making a real difference would require long-term staggering, and it is simply not possible/sustainable. I’m not talking about the stock market. People just won’t tolerate it, especially in the U.S., for that long, and daily life would collapse. I don’t think we have the organizational ability to enforce it or keep everyone in this huge country comfortable by delivering food and medicines—we’ve let things get pretty messed up socially/structurally/in other ways. Tons of people will just flat out run out of money for basics and be unable to obtain healthcare and other things. They will go stir crazy and you’ll get unrest.
The norm in the past has been struggling through large losses of life in pandemics or other crises—it is devastating but societies have handled it many times. And it’s not just selfish feelings of invincibility, it’s simple resignation to reality–people will be willing to risk dying long before 18 months is up. South Korea and Singapore, if they really have it under control, have a very different government structure and took incredibly invasive measures that just won’t happen here for a bunch of reasons.
Things like the Olympics shouldn’t happen, and international travel should be pretty controlled for a while, and people should of course be more cautious than normal. But I think we need a way, way more practical view of what’s going to happen here, which involves acknowledging that a large number of deaths *can* “be allowed to” happen and probably will. As serious and devastating as death is, human history doesn’t give much evidence for the desire to avoid it driving total and long-term societal shutdowns.
While I have no illusions that we’ll get out of this unscathed, the death rate numbers we have are still rather tenuous—we have to see how it actually plays out, so I can’t give a guess. The trajectories we have so far are pretty recent, and we are testing at different rates than other places, and we don’t know if things are being reported correctly. It seems pretty clear that we aren’t recording a huge number of less serious or asymptomatic cases.
“Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful.” — Warren Buffett
Any thoughts on developments to watch for that will indicate specific blue chip companies are bottoming out and will rise again fast?
I don’t know, but the fact that you didn’t call him “Buffet” fills me with the same absurd gratitude I feel towards those who manage to spell “amend” and “anoint” without doubling any letters.
Never thought about this. I’m now referring to him as “Warren Buffet” for the rest of my life and you can’t stop me.
I wonder what foods the Warren Buffet serves.
He will take us all to his Valhalla of freedom and catered seminars.
Roasted rabbit, of course.
Berkshire Hathaway owns Dairy Queen, so there’d be some of that.
Cheseburgers in paradise.
Surely you mean Waren Bufet.
I love Margarittavile.
Rilly? In my experience, people who DON’T spell it Buffet are about as rare as people who write “toe the line” or “sneak peek” without tripping over the homophone.
A sneak peak would be hella impressive. Mountains are huge.
K1 is pretty sneaky. I had to look it up to confirm that it even exists.
So many people talk of giving something “free reign”.
“Here, here”.
“We have this free monarchy it can have!”
Typing `git commit –amend` constantly has forced me to learn the proper spelling. And I still occasionally mess it up.
I’m not even going to consider buying until we’ve hit 40% down from all-time highs. The market is still too unstable and volatile, and that’s not just fear – the one-two punch of the coronavirus and the oil war kind of broke credit markets last week, and they still haven’t stabilized.
If anyone knew where the market will be tomorrow, it would already be there.
Trying to guess when the market has bottomed out is really risky, and is probably worse on average then buying at any other random time.
Agreed.
Doesn’t that imply that trying to buy at market peaks would be better on average?
No, buying now is better than buying later on average. Market peaks are just as hard to time as market bottoms*. That said, the once things are “pretty low” the fact that things might (or even probably will) get even lower isn’t a compelling reason not to buy now unless you’re a very short term trader looking for quick/immediate gains.
*I reserve the right to be harshly corrected by the financial experts who hang around here.
The difference between peaks and bottoms though is the old adage ‘stocks take the stairs up and the elevator down’. The S&P took about 19 months to go from peak to trough in 2007-2009 and 48 months to get from that trough back to the 2007 pea, in 2000 in was ~24 months down and 60 months up. In a bear market stocks generally have an extended period of being ‘cheap’. Now you are missing out on dividends during that period, but you can have money in bonds paying similar rates (typically). Once you are in a bear market there are generally a lot of buying opportunities, and most of the sharp bounces are actually bear market rallies, not the beginning of a new bull market.
The difficulty in most cases is knowing when you are in a bear market (which does not appear to be the case this time). 2018 had two pretty serious draw downs, one starting in Jan and an almost 20% decline starting in October. Neither turned into a bear market itself and the S&P gained over 900 points (~35%) from the lows in Dec 2018 to the highs in early 2020. If you had sold out during that draw down in late 2018 and bought back in sometime in 2019 you are probably worse off than just holding, but at yesterday’s close you were better off just selling out (as long as you were holding bonds or something earning interest) at any point in 2018 and staying out.
I tend think that if you’re investing long-term, that trying to buy during period of very high volatility increase your risk without really increasing long-term returns.
If for some reason prices were going up but were somehow this volatile (as in, 20% swings per day volatile) I’d be nervous about buying then, too.
Right, if you see the TV you want on clearance, 60% off, just go ahead and pull the trigger. Don’t wait, hoping they’ll drop it another %20 percent and end up missing the sale.
I mean, if the goal is “get rich quick” I guess, but if the goal is “make a substantial sum of money over the next several years” the answer is probably go ahead and buy in now.
I think this is a fundamental mistake about what stock prices mean. When prices are lower than they were yesterday, it doesn’t mean they’re “on sale”; more likely it means we have new information that implies that prices were too high yesterday.
Clearly not a perfect analogy.
Actually no, historically trying to guess when a market has bottomed is very difficult, but it has actually a fairly low risk proposition.
Yeah, back in 2009, even if you missed the absolute bottom by three months (on either side, for a total of a six month window) you still got close enough that you’d have doubled your money within 5 years after everything had recovered.
On the other hand, I know people who saw stock markets start to slide in 1999 and bought in then, thinking they were getting a sale, and they didn’t get back to breaking even until right before the 2007 market crash.
And then didn’t have any significant gains until late 2013.
You can find stories of “Bob”, the world’s worst market timer, on line.
Here is one: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-timer/
The punchline is he still comes out way ahead.
NB: I have not verified any of the numbers in this story. Also beware of assuming that the future will always be like the past.
NB2: Bob also stayed in the broad market. If he jumped from stocks to gold to bonds to bitcoin or whatever was the hottest thing, he’d get wiped out.
I replied this the last time you posted it.
Bob is not the world’s worst market timer, he was a bad market timer in the strongest market in history, you get completely the opposite results if you choose Japan or England’s stock exchanges, I suspect you get a worse result if you choose the DAX.
Also not stated as an assumption is the fact that this doesn’t happen if Bob ever has a tough period of unemployment. Somehow ‘Bob’ managed to go through the stagflation 70s, the dot com crash, the GFC and all the little blips along the way without once having to draw on his savings and sell during a recession to cover costs while he looked for a job.
So buy and hold worked for Bob because he was in the 90th percentile for employment in the 99th percentile market in history, and that is our ‘base case’.
Those are perfectly reasonable timelines if you’re talking about retirement investment 25-40 years out.
You have me confused with someone else, and also missed the NB.
EDIT Also, the specific thread was about timing in the recent US stock market.
No its not, zero returns for 14 years means to compound and average 5% returns over say 28 years you need to average 10+% returns over the second 14 year period, and these are nominal returns. If you are flat over 14 years with 2% inflation every year your real return is -25% not 0, and almost all financial advisers recommend being equity heavy when you are younger and shifting more and more of your portfolio to bonds as you get older. There is nowhere to get 10% returns in bonds over a long time horizon right now, and again this is one of the strongest markets in the world, not an average market.
Sorry, someone posted this recently and this type of piece drives me nuts.
Is there a good reason to think that the next 50 years in the US should have markets as strong as the 1970-2015 markets?
So, in general, buying stocks is better than not buying stocks, BUT buying stocks in a falling market before it’s stabilized is still the worst time to do it.
Note for example that anyone who bought stocks yesterday when I said people should wait has already lost 5% of their money, so at least in the narrow sense I was correct that that wasn’t a good moment to jump in.
So I bought that Security Analysis book baconbits9 recommended and I’ve opened my eTrade account. I’m still waiting to buy anything, but I am looking at Disney. They’re down about $50 and I’m pretty sure they’re going to come back when this is all over. If this is all bad enough to kill off Disney then the only safe investment was canned goods and lead anyway.
The discount on Disney reflects how important their parks are to their bottom line. Parks and experiences represent more than half of their total operating profits. A single pandemic makes people wonder how much vacationers will shy away from crowds of global origins for the next year or two.
If i was going to pick one stock to follow and buy into near the lows it would probably be Amazon.
AMZN hit its all-time high on February 19 and hit a 52-week low on March 12. However, the all-time high was $2,185.95 and currently at $1,767.80 (after-hours trading of 3/17). So it’s still only lost 19% of its peak price. Where do you expect it to go?
I wouldn’t put a price on it, this situation is subject to rapid change, and any collapse in the broader markets is going to hit Amazon. I would probably start by dipping a toe in (say 10% of the total amount you want to put there) the week before 1st quarter earnings. It will be bad across the board and could drive a wave of selling, but Amazon might come out relatively unscathed, and if things are improving I might do the same with 2x that amount before Q2 earnings.
The first thing that I would say is that no active investor has seen a market act this way in the US. In 2007 the market peaked almost a year before Lehman brothers set off the collapse, and the S&P was down almost 20% before the major short term sell off happened. Pretty much only the great depression goes from a real market high to a crash in nothing flat, and now this. That makes a lot of historical comparisons suspect, as the deleveraging aspect hadn’t already begun as it usually had in previous crashes.
The only modern crash that looks like this superficially that I know of (I do not have a vast and extensive knowledge of markets though) would be Japan in 1990. The Nikkei fell from 37,000 to 20,000 in 10 month, but that wasn’t the bottom which didn’t come until 2003, and no rally during that time pushed it above 22,500, and it didn’t break that until 2018 (currently at 17,000).
People who are confidently predicting that markets will be back up in 10 years don’t know their broad financial history, and are basically looking only at the US over a century of data. The FTSE 100 (London stock exchanges 100 largest companies) is currently at levels seen AFTER the 2000 decline, and is ~25% down from the 1999 peak. There have been only a couple of short periods where you could sell at a higher point than that peak, and even if you sold out at the 2020 peak you are still only looking at a 10-15% gain over the 1999 peak over 20 years (more than that with dividends, but peak to peak and trough to trough returns have been really poor and nowhere near the 5-8% annual gains that people claim is the norm).
To go to the orginal question about ‘when is a bottom in’ some indicators I would follow.
1. Oil price. You want to see oil prices stabilize, which is hard to tell because oil is fairly volatile, but to don’t want it to be below 30 and bouncing a few dollars a day in either direction.
2. The VIX. VIX is a volatility index, it won’t mark the bottom but it is a good indicator of the direction the market is going in terms of calm/panic.
3. Copper. Copper is often called Dr Copper in the markets as it ‘predicts’ recessions. A sustained rise in copper prices likely means that industrial use is rising again signalling a inflection point from contraction to growth in the economy.
If oil prices rose over $30 a barrel, Copper prices rose over 2.50 and the Vix was down below 20, and those three held for several weeks that would be a decent signal to start buying (but a weak one and subject to another shock).
I don’t know, but as a meta-comment I’d guess this is a case where history is not going to be a good guide. Past recessions and stock crashes have had very different causes from this one, and so you shouldn’t expect that historical patterns will apply.
Every time is different, the market crash right now is a credit crisis, and acting a one.
Could someone explain how “herd immunity” works as a strategy against a pandemic? I know that with vaccines, the people who get them protect those who don’t, but I don’t understand how the idea would work to counter a disease that’s spreading through the populace. Herd immunity would then simply be a consequence of the bad effects of everyone getting the disease and then becoming immune (though there’s some evidence that Covid-19 is biphasic either because people aren’t becoming immune or because there are multiple strains).
If you isolate the old-and-vulnerable, you can let the disease burn through the young-and-stupid.
There are problems with this. There are problems with other plans, too. I’ve been steelmanning this one for a few days. I’m not sure it’s going to hold up.
Right, Robin Hanson has some posts on this too.
Why would that be considered a “herd immunity” strategy though? Herd immunity is just what will happen once enough people are immune. It seems like it would be better to isolate the old-and-vulnerable AND the young-and-stupid to the extent that’s possible. Obviously there’s a trade-off, since lacking full automation we need some portion of people working in order to support the production of food, water, electricity, and medicines, as well as doctors and nurses to work on patients, among some others. That doesn’t change the fact that there a lot of young people who probably should be
welded into apartments“quarantined” with food and water. Clear the streets and issue permits for breaking curfew. Only necessary work is allowed to continue.Now would probably be a good time to try and quantify how many jobs and how much of the economy is essential to supporting survival and how much is either frivolous or only necessary on longer scale timeframes (school education of children, for example).
You’re kind of strawmanning the idea (one that I am skeptical of as well). The plan basically is: Everyone who is low risk, just go about your day, and you probably get C-19, and maybe you miss a day of work with a fever and cough, then you are back in action. Meanwhile, all the high risk people, who are only a small % of the working population, hole up for 2 months. After those 2 months, most of the people in the low risk environment will have already have been exposed and fought off the illness with almost none of them needing serious medical treatment. Now “the herd” is generally immune, and the high risk people can go back into the world, and a few of them will catch C-19, but because most people are already immune and not carrying, those people will be sparse, and our healthcare system will have plenty of capacity to care for them .
Except that it’s impractical to separate people into “high risk” and “low risk” groups with no contact between them. For example, retirement home residents are “high risk” but most of the workers there are “low risk”.
You can isolate the young workers. Have them stay on grounds and only have limited contact with people who are in turn tested regularly.
Yes, this is expensive. Maybe crazy expensive. Shutting down the economy is also crazy expensive.
It’s possible we just can’t get things like this working in time right now. But we should consider things like this for next time instead of deciding “well, that sounds hard.”
Also, some people want to dismiss things by saying “it’s risky.” The problem is every path forward is very risky.
Every young worker has family and friends. You’d have to enforce total isolation for them – indefinitely, possibly for years. Which young worker would agree to that? Do you build separate grocery stores for them to shop at? Do you prohibit them from dating anyone except other retirement home workers? Just a single one-time violation by one of these workers, and the disease is into the elderly population.
The alternative is shutting down the in-person parts of the economy right now (which is not all the economy, perhaps not even a majority of the economy) for just a few months until the disease has disappeared. The number of infected never gets higher than maybe 1% of the population (though whether it’s 0.01% or 10% depends a lot on when exactly you start this). Doesn’t that sound better?
Doesn’t that sound better?
Plan A which is assumed to work definitely sounds better than Plan B which is assumed to fail.
But what if locking down society doesn’t work? I’m doing my part, meanwhile kids are congregating at pubs and beaches. Maybe the lockdown gets so onerous and boring that people at the middle of the conscientious curve start going out and getting infected. Maybe we have months of “just a single one-time violation” by millions of people and this thing keeps going.
We should be working on strict monitoring of our nursing home workers now, simultaneous with our current plan.
If the kids are currently congregating at pubs and beaches, there’s no lockdown. Lockdown means closing the pubs and beaches.
And yes elderly people and particularly homes for the very elderly should be even more careful than the rest of us.
There are risks to both plans. If lockdown is successful, its a great plan. However, if its not almost 100% successful you’ve created an economic depression for almost no gain.
Okay, I understand it a lot better now. Either way, the UK government has decided to abandon the strategy and just do what everyone else is doing now; apparently this paper was influential in that decision.
The thing with that is, as soon as the young-and-stupid are let back out, if the virus is in the general population they’ll all pick it up, be infectious, and pass it around. Herd immunity works something like the old days of measles: a disease of childhood that killed some, had bad effects on others, but the majority recovered and as adults were immune so it was only a disease of childhood that new generations of children born since the last outbreak (and rarely those adults who had never got it as children) became infected with it. Since measles and mumps are worse when contracted as adults, getting it when young and getting it over with are better.
Best outcome is vaccination as children so you don’t get any of these diseases, second best is get it when young (if it’s not likely to kill you), worst is get it as adult when there is a greater risk of complications and when, as we see now, having a huge tranche of adult-age workers out of the workforce either sick or in self-isoation has severe knock-on effects.
The problem is, you can’t isolate the old-and-vulnerable. You can 99% isolate them, but the 1% is going to kill them. Who is going to take care of the old-and-vulnerable, after all? How are they going to buy groceries and visit doctors? What happens when, after 50 million cases, the virus mutates into a form to which the original cases have no immunity? What if this new form is fatal to young people too?
Exactly. Reinfection has already happened, so immunity for anyone in the first place isn’t even a given.
Has it? I hadn’t seen that anywhere (but I haven’t been closely following the news).
Reinfection has already happened
Can I get a citation on that? I can’t find reliable sources claiming it has happened, and I’d like to know the difference between “recovered then got re-infected”, “took longer to recover than thought with a short period of better health in between troughs of bad health” and “picked up secondary opportunistic virus after recovering from original infection, thought it was a re-infection”.
It is also plausible that the first identification was a false positive.
We have a few reports of re-infection.
This is likely reporting mistakes, or flukes of people who just happen to lose resistance. I have a family member who has been vaccinated many times against mumps, but their blood levels always show they have no immunity. It’s just one of those things.
(Edit: already said.)
Hey people of SSC,
How is your church, knitting club, or other regular gathering of people handling all this?
Are there innovations in making the best of the situation that the rest of us can steal? Stuff that wouldn’t generalize but that would be encouraging?
Churches are closed to the public, but churches already were streaming their services, so people now can (still) listen at home.
My church is currently having a debate amongst the leadership board about whether to hold services. We’re not large, but we do have a decent number of older parishioners.
My church livestreamed our service last Sunday on YouTube, but we’re also setting up other ways to stay connected and coordinate mutual aid:
– Right after church, the group of people I usually go out to lunch with started a Google Hangout and set up an experimental Discord server. Some people in that group will be playing Jackbox games together to beat isolation; some are planning to eat lunch together on Google Hangouts for encouragement while working from home.
– Community groups and the Tuesday morning prayer group are all continuing to meet at the usual times over Google Hangouts or Google Meet; Hangouts seems to be the best technology for this, as long as the group is under about ten people. We’re going to encourage people who haven’t joined a community group yet to get into one at least for the duration of the quarantine, so that we know they have at least once source of support.
– One of our deacons has set up a church-wide Slack with channels for #coronavirus-news, #sunday-services, #prayer-requests, #need-help, and #random. People have mostly been sharing news stories and Bible verses (plus some bickering over sports teams) so far.
– We’d like to set up a “coffee hour” next week, encouraging people to talk in smaller groups after the service so it feels like we’re attending church “together,” not just passively watching a sermon. One of my friends says we can use Slack to assign people to random chat groups. That’s not how we usually do coffee hour, but it might actually be better; most of the people I talk to at church are fellow young people who happen to sit on the left side of the building, and it would be great to meet more people in different demographics, with an obvious shared starting point for conversation. We’ll see how it goes next week.
– The church offered assistance for some of the local undergraduates who were moving out over the weekend. Here we ran into some difficulties with coordination, since we were using email routed through our church administrator. In the future, I’d recommend putting helpers and helpees in a group text as soon as possible, since email isn’t a great medium for time-sensitive group tasks.
– On the other hand, the graduate student union at my university is running a mutual aid email service that seems to be working quite well. They set up two Google forms, one for offering aid and one for requesting aid, where people could check off various categories—moving help, a place to stay, grocery delivery, monetary needs, etc. Whenever someone requests help, an (automatic?) email goes out with all the people who offered that particular kind of help bcc’d, people reply with offers, and (usually a few minutes later!) a second email notifies the whole list that the need has been met. It appears to be really efficient, both because it was well designed and because so many people are eager to help.
I’d love to see other suggestions to steal!
The SCA, the medievalist hobbyist group I’m part of, has been cancelling all major events and now, in the West Kingdom (mostly northern California) minor events as well. There seem to be some attempts at online substitutes, but not much. I’ve been wondering how practical it would be to do an online version of my Pennsic bardic circle.
I’m curious how traditional Jewish groups are managing, given the ban on using electricity on the Sabbath. It might be possible to set up a continuous streaming “virtual minyan” such that nobody has to touch their computer to start and stop it. Or, more simply, the rabbi could say these are special circumstances and the normal rule doesn’t apply.
(Was raised modernist Jewish, not currently practicing.)
The (Roman Catholic) Archdiocese of Washington DC has stopped public Masses, closed Catholic schools, and cancelled all meetings and events on Church property. The Archbishop gave everyone a dispensation to miss Mass for the duration of the emergency. My family watched the Sunday Mass streamed over the internet.
From one of my friends:
“I’ve definitely come to think that there is a kind of emotional intelligence that masquerades as or contributes to rational-intellectual intelligence–and that is the ability to entertain facts that make us uncomfortable and decide on them reasonably. Have any of y’all read anything about this?”
There should be something explicit about this rationalist or other writing but I can’t think of anything. Suggestions?
Isn’t that just the definition of rationalism? That’s what I understood it to at least pretend at being.
Sounds sort of like ‘cognitive decoupling’:
I think this is a very important skill for thinking about unpleasant things. Is this person I trust lying to me? Is my country committing atrocities? Is my employer fundamentally doing something crooked and evil? Is that nasty mole on my arm cancer? Are my finances in such a state that I’m headed for bankruptcy? Is my brother’s drinking problem becoming worse?
All those involve factual questions (mostly not CW around here, though in politics many such questions are extremely CW) that also have a strong emotional content, and that can make it hard to reason clearly about them. But thinking clearly about them is really important to make good decisions….
Annoyed by the poorly-socially-distanced line the last time I went grocery shopping, I was thinking: surely the collectively-optimal strategy for scheduling shopping outings at a time of distancing, when people have pretty much nothing to do other than work and shop and care for their kids, looks something like:
— calculate N such that you need to go shopping sometime in the next N days
— pick a random number R uniformly distributed between 1 and N, and go shopping on day R
If everyone did this, we would optimally loadbalance trips to the store, no? (In fact this is analogous to a typical traffic loadbalancing algorithm for distributed systems).
What would it take to make this the socially-accepted thing to do among a large enough chunk of the population? Or is this just too geeky ever to take off? Or has someone else already thought of this and is already trying to make it take off?
The solution that one Asian country found (I forgot which one) was to sell face masks based on the last digit of the birth year.
You always get every item you want on the day you go shopping, and don’t have to return in a day or two for a missed item?
You always refill everything at once?
I split shopping between 3-4 stores. No only do I not necessarily have the time to run to all of them in the same day, but frequently an item or two will not be in stock and I’ll have to go back in a day or two.
And I have never, and don’t want to start, calculating the run-out time to the day for every single grocery item. I actually can’t calculate this, as my household’s diets aren’t so regimented that everything is used in a particular quantity, order, and time.
I believe the best distribution is during time of day, not day of week. If there was a way to go shopping anytime during the day, and not have your groceries spoil (or travel too far from work/home), this would work better. To an extent this happens already, as you can see retiree-age people predominating when shopping around 10 – 2 on the weekdays. There’s definitely room for more shoppers in the early morning and late evening, though.
Let me stop you right there and point out the difficulty of coordination problems.
Also, if you try treating people as perfectly rational 100% of the time, stopping to run through a load balancing optimization problem before going shopping, you’re probably assuming too much. On an individual level, many people don’t even make a shopping list before going to the store and end up having to go back for forgotten items, which is an order of magnitude less thought then doing calculations for optimal shopping times.
People do things for immediate convenience and optimize for not having to think a lot most of the time.
I think the only way you could influence this behavior is through an economic incentive at the store or having some government mandate.
What hypotheses can we check with and what events can we expect due to the natural experiment(s) that are now happening?
1. Will exam results will be worse for kids that had their school closed for weeks/months?
2. Will tinder use and the number of relationships increase because people realize that a partner is more reliable in a pandemic than friends, sex clubs, hobbies, prostitutes and SSC meetups?
3. Is there going to be a baby boom?
4. Are similar companies that sent their workers home (earlier) going to do worse than those who don’t?
5. Is working at home going to get a permanent boost?
6. Will countries with more deaths rebound more strongly, economically, due to ‘dead weight’ dying more often?
7. Will countries with more deaths see higher incomes for workers?
And what situations will offer or offered the best natural experiments? People on opposite sides of state/Schengen borders? Countries/states with more/fewer deaths. Countries/states with different policies? These all have many confounders. Are there natural experiments that are more reliable?
My predictions:
1. Gurl jvyy, gur jbefr gur ybatre fpubby vf abg tvira
2. Srne bs fbpvnyvmvat jvyy fybjyl nongr naq gur jbefrarq rpbabzl jvyy yrnir crbcyr jvgu yrff zbarl naq gvzr gb qngr
3. Anl. Onol znxvat vf gbb cynaarq naq gur vqrn gung cnegaref jub ner fghpx va pybfr pbagnpg jvyy unir puvyqera vtaberf gung ovegu pbageby jbexf.
4. Abg fvtavsvpnagyl.
5. Lrf, ohg bayl n fznyy obbfg.
6. Gur terngre qnzntr jvyy bssfrg guvf, fb zber qrnguf vf jbefr
7. Artngvir, gur ynobe znexrgf ner gbb vagreangvbany sbe gung
I’m not really sure I understand your #2. Do you mean less money and more time, or less money AND less time?
And/or.
Some people will lose their jobs, they will have time, but not much money.
Those with jobs will have to work harder on average. They will have equal or less money, but less time.
3. I agree, plus, who wants to bring a child into what may well turn out to be a recession? Well, someone comfortably well-off, I suppose.
Bringing a kid into a recession in 2020 America is like bringing a kid into a boom time for essentially all of human history more than about 20-30 years ago.
This seems overly simplistic, at best.
That’s not exactly true. There is the substantial possibility that I lose my job, so the risks are substantially worse, even if median income isn’t worse. Plus, fixed expenses are probably higher, too.
My questions in this vein:
1. Will social trust decrease due to weeks-to-months of people thinking of every random stranger they see as a disease vector?
2. Will self-esteem decrease and/or depression increase due to weeks-to-months of people thinking of *themselves* as disease vectors?
I suspect the most prominent effects will not stem from the thought of people as disease vectors, but rather from isolation. Lack of social contact, lack of sunlight, and repetitive surroundings are more biologically important and will have stronger effects, I predict, than cultural/personal perceptions of disease.
Oh come on, Aapje, this is the sort of thing that shows Rot13 has gone too far. Why did you have to hide your answers? I’d like to see a moratorium on Rot13.
I was assuming it was rot13 to avoid the possibility of people conforming (or, given this place, anti-conforming) their answers to his?
Right. Don’t anchor when you want uninfluenced answers.
+1
@marshwiggle
Yes, I wanted to have people think for themselves before looking at my answers.
1. This is is difficult experiment because curriculums are going to have to change so what are you comparing?
2. Tinder use will decrease because of social distancing. Also long term romantic partners are more reliable than friends, but short term romantic partners are way less reliable than friends. A related question – will people get married more in the near term future? I think yes. People desire stability in times of crisis so I think people will settle down a little more over the next few years.
3. No baby boom. People are stressed and pessimistic – not the right conditions for producing a child. If there is a sharp rebound late this year or next year and everyone turns out better than we expect then yes there might be a baby boom. But I doubt that scenario playing out.
4. Impossible to answer. Companies that will do well are those that sell inelastic goods like toilet paper, salt and healthcare. Everyone else will do badly regardless of their specific policies. However, companies might increase remote work if this experiment goes well (a really good time to be in the teleconferencing field!).
5. Yes
6. No, countries with more deaths will be hurt by this. I doubt there is much economic benefit to killing old people and there are more important negative economic effects. Effects on businesses, supply chains, perceptions by other countries and thus trade etc.
7. No, the negative economic effects overwhelm anything else. Besides workers are not just workers – the are also consumers. Decreasing supply and demand for labor means it isn’t possible to predict the outcome. They probably cancel out.
Edit: looks like we basically agree on every point.
1. I assume that exams will stay the same
2. I was referring to the period after social distancing ends.
7. The question is more whether power shifts to workers, as has been theorized was the effect of the bubonic plague
That was a result of a much larger percentage die off. Reduce the ratio of labor to land and wages go up and rents go down. In the present case, total mortality of one percent of the population looks like a high estimate.
Also, the bubonic plague killed everyone, while this disease disproportionately affects people that aren’t working anyways.
@DavidFriedman
Sure, but my reasoning was that any effect will be pretty much impossible to see by comparing countries that were hit hardest and those that weren’t.
So then I didn’t actually have to evaluate whether the deaths will increase wages to answer the question.
How will this collective experience affect peoples’ attitudes toward global warming?
Regarding your answer to 3: What applies here that doesn’t apply to power outage baby booms? I thought they had been verified?
Perhaps, there seems very little evidence, with a single African study with a major effect, a Colombia study with a small effect and a negative effect during hurricanes.
With studies tending to p-hack and Western societies not very being very young (the increase in kids was mostly found among the very young in one study), the expected boom is probably close to zero. I expect the negative effects of the economic damage to dominate.
1. Will exam results will be worse for kids that had their school closed for weeks/months?
No. My expectaction is that they’ll be about the same, with smarter kids with smarter parents getting a small boost.
2. Will tinder use and the number of relationships increase because people realize that a partner is more reliable in a pandemic than friends, sex clubs, hobbies, prostitutes and SSC meetups?
No idea.
3. Is there going to be a baby boom?
Yep. Lots of young couples are stuck at home without a lot else to do every evening….
4. Are similar companies that sent their workers home (earlier) going to do worse than those who don’t?
Probably, but there are going to be too many confounding variables to untangle causality. Brain work is easier to telecommute for, and brain work pays better and has smarter employees.
5. Is working at home going to get a permanent boost?
Yes, massively. Lots of organizations and employees will have experience and infrastructure for doing it.
6. Will countries with more deaths rebound more strongly, economically, due to ‘dead weight’ dying more often?
I think it depends on the aftermath of the infection. If it kills off the old and sickly and leaves everyone else alone, then probably it causes a boost to the economy long-term, as nursing homes close down for lack of business. That’s a hell of a nasty way to get an economic boost, but it might work. But if it kills off 50-60 year olds in large numbers, you’re losing a big chunk of your management class and your most experienced and knowledgeable workers. And if it leaves a lot of formerly-healthy people with permanent disabilities (this happened with SARS, I think), then it could leave us a whole lot poorer–we end up with higher medical bills and more people retiring or going on disability early.
7. Will countries with more deaths see higher incomes for workers?
If lots of the 50s-60s folks die off, then there will be more spots available at the top of the ladder, so probably the people in their 40s waiting for a spot to open up above them will do pretty well. Not sure abotu the economy as a whiole.
Maybe.
Of course, I could also envision plenty of companies doing an “internal study” that basically goes: “During the two months where everybody worked from home, our stock declined by 30%. Therefore, working from home BAD.”
I just bet about half of my remaining predictit funds on Biden. I now believe he will win in a landslide. I don’t see how we get through this COVID situation without a massive recession (even the actions already taken are enough to ensure that – and there’s likely much more to come). Trump spent the last year saying “vote for me because of the economy” and is about to enter an election season with an economic crisis worse than 2008. I don’t see how that’s survivable. No amount of crazy gaffes or far-left pandering can surpass what’s coming… and this time, as the incumbent, Trump will have to be on the defensive rather than on the attack, which he’s much better at. “It would have been even worse if I wasn’t in charge” will be a tough sell on a populace going through the largest societal disruption this country has seen since the 1940s.
Depends. I don’t really see people blaming Trump for the economy, so it comes down to “who can best fix the economy wrecked by the coronavirus.” If you think Trump mismanaged the reaction to the coronavirus, last I saw a few days ago Biden was still saying travel bans are no good, so that doesn’t seem better. Beyond that nothing else has changed. On immigration Trump still wants to build wall; deport illegals, and Biden’s now saying moratorium on deportations.
Before I would have said Trump wins. Now I would say…probably Trump wins, but things are chaotic and I do not have high confidence in any prediction. We’re basically in uncharted territory and anything can happen. I wouldn’t make any bets one way or the other.
Again, I don’t understand the sudden elevation of the average voters ability to grasp nuance. I mean, maybe they won’t specifically blame him, but enough are low information enough to say ‘i don’t give a f, but the economy sucks, lets try the new guy’
There’s no nuance to be grasped. “It’s the virus” is not nuanced, and largely true.
yes. I agree with this. But I’m still not going to be too surprised when someone claims average voter isn’t able to grasp something equally unnuanced.
Disagreed. Voters are pretty clear about the difference between “external struggle causes bad” and “internal errors cause bad”.
There is a reason that the worst economy in American history also coincided with the longest run of a single party controlling the White House in American history.
1801-1829? It’s hard to draw conclusions as electors were not all popularly elected until 1880
@meh
Hah, you got me. I meant the modern party system and was referring to FDR and Truman.
Besides, John Quincy Adams doesn’t count. 🙂
ok, this is some evidence, though 2 factors make me think maybe there is something else going on.
1. they took over from an even worse economy
2. the bd economy could have been overshadowed by the outpouring of patriotism due to the war. Possibly the same as 9/11, the patriotism spike was much stronger than any economic blame assesment. Unfortunately, the virus is like fighting a war without the patriotism spike.
Of course, the 1940s are the era of President-for-life Roosevelt, followed by his VP becoming his two-term successor for an unprecedented period of administative continuity in the United States.
Trump’s hope for victory is A: the actual COVID-19 crisis abetting this summer and B: a quick even if incomplete economic rebound when it does and C: most of his supporters putting all of this in the external-threat bucket. A is moderately likely, B is moderately likely given A, and C is moderately likely given A and B, but it does take all three so your bet seems a reasonably safe one.
What odds did you get?
About even money. I bought Biden shares for 49 cents. Trump shares are trading for like 46.
Trump needs more than just his die-hard supporters; he also needs a bunch of independents as well.
If the virus peaks and falls off in late spring early summer and there is a boom summer following it when everyone returns to work, Trump could absolutely get reelected, especially if Europe gets hammered way worse.
Otherwise, I fear you’re right.
I basically agree with this but not the landslide part, and there’s still uncertainty:
It’s not impossible that the economy starts to recover by say August or September, and I think most of the poly sci research indicates that it’s the trend of the economy that matters most. If things look up, the stock market rebounds even though it’s effectively down for the year, etc., this could help Trump a lot.
Partisanship is obviously extremely high in the US, and there are vast vast chunks of America who are going to either vote Republican literally no matter what happens. There are no more landslide elections man. Trump comes with a solid 40ish % of the voting populace (not total population) who are going to vote for him even if he personally threw a pipe bomb onto to the Nasdaq floor and singlehandedly causes a recession (this is my attempt to be funny, sorry). Also, 2018 showed very high voter turnout by Republicans even in a midterm year which is unusual, which just further shows that politics are Really Important to the American psyche and that both sides are fired up. EDIT to include: if we repeat the 2016 map, the Dems probably have to win the national popular vote by 3 million plus in order to get more delegates.
Biden is at best a replacement-level politician with some degree of dirt in his past (I say this as someone who will be voting for him). This is not a prime Bill Clinton or Obama against Trump, this is a kind of mediocre politician and weak debater who has plenty of shady deals and relatives (everyone’s focused on his son right now, but his brother looks to be a much shadier character- I’d imagine the RNC is holding back on that oppo dump until the summer).
Liberal enthusiasm & particularly young voter enthusiasm for Biden will be weak, and I expect some Me Too allegations don’t come out against Biden and weaken that support further. Plus I’d be surprised if there’s not another Jill Stein candidacy to peel them off, and Parscale & the RNC are certainly smart enough to fund/encourage/set up a Super PAC to get behind a 3rd party far left candidate (haven’t heard much from Tulsi Gabbard recently….)
The Russians are clearly pretty pro-Trump, and I think we’ve seen enough now to say that foreign propaganda operations are part of our modern world- there’s no magic cure for it (and obviously Trump will not lean too hard against them while they’re supporting him). You’ll see a repeat of RT coming up with a crazy allegation that’s then repeated by Fox News, Breitbart, the RNC, etc. If it’s not collusion it effectively is.
So, considering all that, but most importantly the 40-45% of the population who will vote for Trump literally no matter what, I wouldn’t go higher than 55% on Biden under any circumstances
I think that if countries like Spain and France continue to fair (much) worse than the US, that the COVID situation could actually benefit Trump. If he’s able to point to other first world countries and say “look how much better I did!” I think that will actually play well. So, I think I’m still sticking with Trump as a mild favorite.
Yes, but what if Biden gets infected and dies?
People who bet on Hillary to win the Democratic nomination make a lot of money?
Trump is one of the best campaigners of all time. Biden is one of the worst. It ain’t over ’til it’s over.
Here is somebody who thinks similarly to you:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/peter-wehner-trump-presidency-over/607969/
Of course this guy is (albeit conservative) biased against. Still, interesting to read his list of lies and mistakes.
A pretty tasteless thought is that the disease will affect Trump’s voter base above average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/631231/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-age/
I’m ashamed to bring this up, but it might have an effect.
A more significant issue may be that most of the major players are old — Trump, Biden, Sanders, and a lot of the House and Senate leadership. What happens if one or two of them die?
There are two Supreme Court Justices over 80, another over 70 and three more over sixty. One of the over sixty Justices (Justice Sotomayor) is also a diabetic, which is a very high risk.
It is entirely possible that we lose 2-3 Justices in an election year. In case 2020 wasn’t exciting enough already.
I hadn’t even thought of that, but you are right. Even one dying would up the stakes in the election.
@DavidFriedman
Looks like I’m not the only one who realized this.
https://freebeacon.com/courts/supreme-court-suspends-arguments-amid-coronavirus-fears/
No offense to the older generations, but has anyone considered that maybe we shouldn’t concentrate so much power/authority in government in a bunch of relatively frail elderly people?
Well, the alternative is to give it to hearty young people, and they have a nasty habit of running around battle axing each other when you do that.
@acymetric
Agreed. We should all join together and encourage Ginsburg to enjoy her well-earned retirement. And perhaps Breyer as well.
@DavidFriedman : Unless they die in the Fall (which could always happen but probably not from coronavirus anymore), it shouldn’t affect the election. Trump will appoint a replacement, and (after a big kerfuffle) the Senate will confirm. Since the new Justice will probably be healthier than the dead one had been, the stakes will only be lowered.
I think it depends how things are by November; if there is still self-isolation and bans on large groups, that is going to have a huge effect on “how the heck do we get people out to vote?” so, provided the election still goes ahead as normal and it’s not all done by postal voting, then it depends.
If things are really bad, there may be a cry for “kick the bum out” and the hope that a new administration can make it all better. Unfortunately, if things are really bad, there’s no making it all better by the magic of novelty, there’s just suffering through to the end.
If things are much the same as they are now or a little/a lot better, it’s likely to be “don’t change horses in mid-stream”, and “stick with the devil you know”. The current administration at least has a handle on how things are going, a completely new one will take time at the start to get up and running, and that is time wasted.
If it’s Biden versus Trump (which it is probably going to be), and things are not very much worse, I think Trump has a reasonable chance of winning a second term. I don’t see a landslide for either candidate no matter who wins.
If someone is going to change their vote over COVID-19, that would probably be because they think Trump didn’t do enough. But Biden’s rhetoric is:
If a voter thinks Trump has flubbed the coronavirus response by not doing enough, Biden is not the guy who’s going to do more for them.
This is probably a good value. I think a lot of people here are overestimating an inevitable 2nd Trump term. It’s not that he had a good or bad first term, but his initial margin of victory was a lot smaller than folks want to remember, and enough voters were not blown away by the first term.
I use 2016 as a bottom for Biden, since I don’t see him doing any worse than someone as despised as Clinton. There were 6 states Trump won in 2016 with less than 50% of the vote (7 if you include Utah, but I don’t since it won’t be in play)
That means he doesn’t even have to flip that many people, only attract independents, or voters who wouldn’t vote for either DT or HRC. In PA the margin was 0.72% and Biden’s native son status will almost certainly give him enough to cover that margin. The Michigan margin was 0.23%, and I think he has enough rust belt cred to make that one nearly certain as well. Then to win he will need just one of
Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina
Which is better than a coin flip in favor of him imo. and really, any support for or against the candidates in the other 43 states is pretty meaningless.
At even odds I don’t think Biden is a good bet. I think Trump is a favorite, although only a modest one and a really bad response to the virus could absolutely torpedo him.
PA has actually polled the most swingy of the three Rust Belt states, and seems to be pure tossup. This is partially the secular movement of the Rust Belt away from Democrats and partly that Biden has inexplicably come out aggressively against fracking. Michigan I agree leans Democrat.
The other four mentioned lean Republican both secularly and candidate specifically.
Florida especially Trump has a strong home state advantage and it’s a state where Republicans won statewide against a strong candidate in a very D year in 2018.
The other states not mentioned that may change from 2016 are New Hampshire, where polling is relatively sparse but Trump has done surprisingly well, and Minnesota, which is to the left of the rest of the Rust Belt but has been more like Wisconsin recently.
I don’t know, given the slim margin, and his native status I would bet the farm PA is a lock. (though off the top of my head, Trump and Gore did not carry their homes)
In order from most to least likely to flip, I think:
Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina
so yes, I wouldn’t bet on Florida to flip at even odds; but one out of those 4? I’d take that. Wisconsin was less than 1% in 2016, and in 2018 Ds won senate, and beat an incumbent governor.
Terrible bet. PA is the toss-up-est state in the Union this year. Technically Biden’s home state for running for office purpose is Delaware, btw.
Although Trump’s legal home state in 2016 was New York, he already lived in Florida most of the time and it was his de facto home state. He has since legally changed it and is de jure running as a resident of Florida.
I think that’s correct, perhaps reversing Wisconsin and Arizona. They’re pretty close.
One of those four and not one of the others flipping back is what you’re actually betting on. Much less sure. Especially since as we saw in 2016, states can be heavily correlated.
In my view those four lean Republican, PA and NH are tossups and MI and MN lean Dem.
Now, both sides can win a state that leans the other way (PA and MI I would’ve said both leaned D last election), but that’s the way it goes.
If it just comes down to partisan conflict and the state of the economy, then it doesn’t look good for Trump. If it’s more that the country is in a state of crisis and we need continuous leadership, then it could help him.
So far there hasn’t been any rally around the flag effect. I did think Trump’s last press conference was substantially better, both for the country and for Trump politically. It focused more on shared sacrifice in a way that could activate a conflation of civic loyalty with support for the current administration. We’ll see if he can stay on message; my sense is that Trump’s political skills are optimized for a high partisan conflict environment.
I think Trump has a chance if the coronavirus situation passes without becoming a major disaster.
None of his opponents are going to make the argument that we should have prioritize the economy over public health. All of his opponents are going to argue that he handled the virus crisis poorly. Whether that sticks will depend a lot on how well the crisis actually goes. He is now the COVID president, whether he likes it or not.
(His opponents have a lot of ammunition if the crisis goes poorly– the fact that his appointee John Bolton fired the pandemic team at the CDC will is very damaging in that situation.)
I’m sure Trump is hoping for a warm summer, and even more, a quickly available vaccine. I don’t know how feasible the second one is but I feel like it’s more feasible than many people are predicting now.
This isn’t even close to a fact. The CDC wasn’t changed. The pandemic office in the NSC (not the CDC) was merged into a single directorate.
https://freebeacon.com/media/media-democrats-ran-with-false-claim-trump-disbanded-pandemic-office/
Now, that’s mostly irrelevant. If Trump does a great job, the Democrats yelling about things weeks and years old won’t matter at all, and if he does a poor job it won’t matter to anyone why.
I remain skeptical that firing the pandemic response actually changed things, because (and this is now the third time I’ve asked) no one has followed up with an explanation for what had changed.
But as a political ad? Hoo boy. It would be malpractice for the Democratic nominee’s campaign to not harp on that.
It won’t matter, honestly. The news cycle is too fast. Trump is going to get obliterated in November if he handles this badly, and if he does well, nobody will care if he theoretically should’ve prepared better.
In fact, harping on “we should’ve had more bureaucrats” if Trump does a great job would look even more out of touch and probably hurt.
It matters less how he handles it and more on what the outcome is. If Trump does everything right from now on and we’re still under significant restrictions or experience a situation as bad as Italy, he’s probably out. If he screws up by the numbers and it turns out summer saves us, he’s probably in.
Seems to me that he put the travel bans in too late (but sooner than any Democrat would have), and was way too slow in getting the CDC and FDA off their butts about testing.
@The Nybbler
Yes, that’s what I meant by “does a great job”, but you said it much better than I did.
Americans care only about outcomes, not process. If the Democrats run ads against Trump’s process when deaths were low and the economy bounces back, they’ll look terrible.
If deaths are high and the economy is terrible, Democrats can run ads on that instead of the process.
I am amazed by the rapidity and severity of measures put in place in the states, but I am highly skeptical we can keep this up for 4 months or more, and projections I have seen suggest this thing is likely to peak in july at the earliest. Is it possible we are setting ourselves up for failure, by reacting too strong, too fast? I.e. rather than flattening the curve, we are just shifting it to the right, incurring great economic damage and “blowing our load” too early?
Not actually advocating against current measures just trying to think about the long haul.
there’s no chance it can be kept for 4 months. Even 1 seems to be pushing it.
That’s the UK’s argument. “This might seem tolerable and even exciting now, but it’s gonna turn into a real drag and we need to delay the worst measures.”
*EDIT*: maybe not. https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/coronavirus-uk-strategy-deaths The UK Only Realised “In The Last Few Days” That Its Coronavirus Strategy Would “Likely Result In Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths”
Next time someone says Dominic Cummings is some kind of rationalist genius, I’m going to remind them of this.
That’s kind of exactly the plan I’d expect a genius to take, honestly.
“We will all get infected anyway, so why take extraordinary measures that don’t change the final result but hurt in the interim?”
And it is indeed a good plan… if the premise is true. Perhaps modern Westerners are too fragile and soft to accept it, but I feel certain my grandparents would have.
However, it seems to me that the containment of the outbreak by several countries demonstrates the premise is false. And that changes everything.
There’s a big difference in mortality if everyone gets infected in one month vs everyone getting infected in three months.
Using some rough numbers I used before, assume 6 million people end up needing ICU beds for 1 week each. There’s around 30,000 available ICU beds normally. So each month you can have 120,000 people in your ICU beds. So your big difference ends up being 5.88 million dead for lack of hospital capacity as opposed to 5.97 milion dead.
@The Nybbler
Yeah, if everyone is guaranteed to get infected in the next three months, then all this social distancing and cetera is pure wastage, plus even if it isn’t, a genius seems more likely to reduce people to pure numbers and say “well, mostly 80+ people are dying, and spiking the economy hard for the poor in order to add two years of life to them isn’t worth it”.
Look at the ease with which Stalinybbler here dismisses almost one hundred thousand deaths with an effete wave of his bejewelled hand. Big difference.
“Okay, here’s our plan to kill 5.8 million Britons and 1 clown.”
“Wh– wh– why do you want to kill a clown?”
“See?? I told you no one cared about 5.8 million dead Britons!”
@ Secretly French
I don’t know if The Nybbler’s numbers are realistic.
But it’s plausible that having most of society shelter in place for the next few months will result in large numbers of people* losing jobs, businesses failing, families depleting their emergency funds (if they have any)/failing to pay rent or mortgages/being evicted, lack of hiring due to the decline or shutdown of a large portion of industry, etc. At some point down the chain, all of this mess culminates in increased deaths too, just not directly due to contracting covid-19.
So, please quit it with the Stalin cheap shots.
—————————-
* Low millions if we just count employees in the restaurant industry.
@EchoChaos,
Somehow I expect such a ‘genius’ to sit in a swivel chair, wear a Nehru jacket and carry a cat!
The Nybbler,
My understanding is that virus patients require an ICU bed for 4 weeks on average, not one week. So spreading it over three months is even less effective.
One problem with the strategy though is that it may create a permanent travel ban between countries that have the disease circulating and those that don’t (China, Singapore, South Korea, etc).
Wait, what happened to Secretly French’s comment? I didn’t think you could delete your comments, and Scott doesn’t normally delete posts either as a moderator.
You can delete within the edit window.
@LesHapablap
I wasn’t able to easily find an average ICU bed stay for patients who survive. (I found one range of “3 to 20 days”, but 20 days was the end of the study period). All my assumptions were intended to be optimistic; I was using them before to demonstrate that “flattening the curve” is untenable even under optimistic assumptions.
(as for the nasty comment towards me, I suspect it got auto-removed by too many reports.)
I’ll wait until the end of the epidemic to give a verdict. It could turn out that the suppression strategy also results in hundreds of thousands of deaths (possibly because lockdowns can’t be maintained as long as they would be necessary), and a huge economic damage on top of them.
I’m guessing from the timestamp that you replied after the edit. In which case, changing your mind based on new evidence is pretty much what a rationalist does. And what politicians seldom do, btw.
To me, the story is a bit depressing and looks like this: UK looked around and made a plan that was somewhat (not that much) different from what everybody was doing. The press, which is treating UK gov almost as fairly as they do Trump, quickly translated it to “our strategy is to infect everybody”. To the point it took _days_ before I even found the briefest description of what UK was actually trying to do. Soon after, UK updated its plans based on new info, and is now more in line with everybody.
The UK government is following the recommendations of their specialists. Per the ICL report linked in the BuzzFeed article, new data from Italy lead them to double their estimate of peak ICU demand given a mitigation strategy, prompting the change to suppression.
They expect suppression measures to be required until late July initially, and then intermittently for about two thirds of the time in spells of a couple of months until an effective vaccine can be widely distributed, which they expect to be late 2021.
This is classic changing your mind because the facts changed. It also shows why they were reluctant to adopt containment: the costs are modelled as being much higher than general discussion seems to assume.
That the UK is finally getting serious about this, or that things are at a grave state, is shown by the cancellation of the Grand National which was due to take place next month. They allowed Cheltenham to go ahead (due to the amount of money that would otherwise have been lost) but they’ll lose as much or more by cancelling the Grand National.
This is sensible, and Cheltenham should have been cancelled (but wasn’t due to economic considerations, despite a confirmed case of COVID-19 in the village), but it does demonstrate how severe measures are necessary.
What are these projections based on?
The data I’ve seen showed that in China, the number of new cases started dropping pretty much immediately when the Wuhan quarantine was implemented, if the estimates of when patients got the disease are used. (The statistics based on when it was diagnosed show an approx. 10 day delay.) To the extent the Chinese numbers can be believed, the epidemic mostly stopped in China 1.5–2 months after the quarantine started. We’ll see in a few days if the Italy lockdown is similarly effective.
At that point, the main concern is reinfection from abroad or from sporadic domestic cases. That’s a concern until the epidemic is over in every country, either due to herd immunity or strict containment measures (depending on each country’s strategy). Whether and when that will happen is hard to predict.
At that point, the main concern is reinfection from abroad
So we’re going to drop the cases to zero — or close enough to zero — that we can do tracking and isolation on each individual case that comes in?
That might work, but we’ll need to quarantine/track every single person who comes in.
Or just test every person who comes in. Possibly just with an IR thermometer for most of them; that will miss a few at the very beginning of the contagious period but if we isolate and backtrace those as soon as they report symptoms that may be good enough.
Wasn’t that our initial strategy which failed in the first place?
Our initial strategy seems to have ignored people who came in from e.g. Canada, because Canada isn’t Asia and someone forgot that lots of Asians travel to Canada. And it didn’t involve (usefully) backtracing the contacts of people who develop symptoms after arriving in the US, because that would require tests that we didn’t have.
Isn’t that what several Asian countries already did?
Does anyone know where I could get a spreadsheet that has the daily increase in cases/deaths for all the different countries that are reporting their COVID numbers?
I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re asking for, but here is JHU’s data:
https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
That’s almost exactly what I was looking for. I was hoping for something that updates every day and has countries instead of splitting it up into counties, but all the data I need is here, thank you.
I know this is the best data we have so not much point in complaining, but.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ is useful, gets updated often, and may have some of the data you need.
https://criticalcarecanada.com/presentations/2012/critical_care_unit_capacity_in_canada_have_we_failed_to_advocate_adequately.pdf
Check out page 15.
Can anyone make sense of that chart at the bottom? At first I thought it was saying that a 0.02% influx of sudden critical illness translates to 16.7% of hospitals exceeding capacity, 0.03% leading to 58.8% of hospitals exceeding capacity, etc. but I’m not sure now. Is it an absolute number of 16.7 and 58.8 “regions” that will experience capacity overflow? Like, between 16 and 17 counties will have hospitals with insufficient capacity if the country gets a 0.02% infection rate?
I think it is “percent of regions,” since the number looks like it asymptotically approached 100.
If 1/10,000 people suddenly show up, all regions are okay.
If 2/10,000 people suddenly show up, 16.7% of regions are in trouble.
*EDIT* There are 306 Hospital Referral Regions. https://www.dartmouthatlas.org/faq/
It’s the latter – 0.02% of the population suffering sudden critical illness means 16.7 ‘hospital referral regions’ will run into critical care shortages. I’m not sure how any of that’s defined, exactly, but I imagine it’s something like % regional population needing ventiliation or other major support and within a couple of hours of large hospitals (which tend to cluster in urban areas for obvious reasons).
To put it another way, 16 referral regions couldn’t cope with a 0.02% critical illness rate in that region. The 0.7 is probably just a mathematical artifact; I can only imagine this was thrown together by an overworked intern or research assistant who didn’t think about how ‘is the region overwhelmed or not’ doesn’t really make sense except as a integer.
Or it could be percentages, like Edward Scizorhands says above, but then I’m going to be really mad at whoever did the table design.
How long does it take from being exposed to being contagious? Two days?
My household is limiting errands to one per day, and I wonder if there is social benefit to altering who runs them.
Assume we all start healthy. If I’m the one who goes out every day, assume I get infected on day 1. I could infect people on day 3. (This also assumes I don’t just bring home the virus on my hands and immediately infect everyone else. Assume I wash up well on return.) I wouldn’t notice until day 7. That’s errands on 4 days or so where I am spreading.
But I won’t infect my wife right away. With luck, I might not infect her until day 4. So on day 7, when I show symptoms, she has only just started being communicable. If she has made half the errands, that has cut the number of times we exposed the community by half. If we recruit our son into the cycle, we’ve egress filtered down by two thirds!
(Obviously on day 7, as soon as I have symptoms, we all assume we’re all infected and go into lock down anyway.)
Are my numbers right? And if they are, is this a strategy that every household should adopt if possible?
Alternating errands also has the effect of making sure everyone gets to go outside sometimes.
Some numbers based on the current evidence that may inform your analysis.
The mean incubation period is about 5-6 days from infection. The max is currently estimated at 14 days. The infectious period looks to start 1-2 days before the incubation period ends and symptoms begin to appear.
Peak infectiousness after symptoms show ranges from 5-10 days, dependent on disease severity.
Sources:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30567-5/fulltext
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32150748
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502v1.full.pdf
> How long does it take from being exposed to being contagious?
There are specific cases of 12 hours from infection to retransmission. Sorry, I don’t remember the source; I’ve been reading/watching so much stuff about this.
Bay Area six counties expected to be under “Shelter in place” order until April 7th.
I imagine this will not apply to the homeless, restaurants, grocery stores, pharmacies, etc.
Questions:
Is this enforceable in 2020 in the Yay?
Is it too late?
Will there be so many loopholes that it will be ineffective ?
Why would you not expect it to apply to restaurants?
I could even see it applying to grocery stores after a certain grace period to stock up.
Can a health inspector shut down a restaurant at will?
Sure they can. They’re only typically armed with padlocks, though.
It seems pretty dumb to pick a fight with health inspector in the middle of a health crisis.
In some states, restaurants have been limited to offering take out or delivery only.
Enforceable as a matter of law? Yes. California law authorizes public health officers to order any measure necessary to preserve the public health and prevent the spread of disease. Health & Safety Code §§ 101040 and 120175. (Other states have similar laws.)
Enforceable as a matter of state capacity to enforce? Who the hell knows anymore.
@Skeptic,
I should apologize for a previous thread, other candidates did mention the incidents but few cared, you were right it was reported on, but not followed up on.
I haven’t heard any “shelter in place” orders yet; but schools and public libraries are closed, and the governor is “suggesting” bars close and no sit down dining for restaurants.
Plumber,
You don’t owe me an apology for anything! Cheers.
Maybe this will get revised, but this is the news I’m reacting to:
Released today
FWIW it says restaurants will stay open. As well as veterinarians’ offices and auto repair shops…
In the last hour my boss called a meeting and told us that the apprentice is being furloughed for three weeks starting tomorrow, but the rest of us are “essential City and County of San Francisco disaster service workers” and still have to work regular shifts or more, and to carry our I.D. badges going to and from work now as cops may start enforcement of “shelter in place”.
I had already signed out a vacation hour to buy St. Paddy’s Day fixings for the crew tomorrow, and now I’m in line at Safeway along with a third of San Francisco as the shelves are stripped by folks preparing for siege.
My husband was told the same thing here in Philadelphia (he’s a sewage treatment plant operator). The city is pretty much shut down; schools, bars, playgrounds, libraries, many city offices, courts, restaurants (although delivery and take out is allowed) and all “non-essential” retail. He’s already working a lot of overtime because two coworkers are out sick (not confirmed Coronavirus cases or anything); I expect it to get worse because a large portion of the workers are over 55.
@sami,
When and how fast did Philadelphia shut down?
Maybe there were more signs, but for San Francisco it seemed very sudden to me!
It was pretty sudden. On Saturday the mayor was urging people to go out to restaurants over the weekend, on Monday they shut everything down. There is no “shelter in place” order yet, but it would not surprise me to get one soon. I have a friend a couple blocks from us whose husband is also currently working crazy hours in critical infrastructure and who has a kid the same age as my son, so I’m going to ask her to be quarantine buddies with me to make it less onerous.
@sami,
Thanks, hope you and your loved ones stay well, good luck.
Good luck Plumber, as to the fast announcement that does seem to be how state bodies are handling it everywhere – today it’s “no quarantine, everything as normal, don’t panic” then the next day it’s “okay, everyone stay at home, pubs and large public gatherings shut down, nobody go anywhere unless absolutely vital”. Changes of advice based on what is the latest recommendation are happening everywhere!
Take care of yourself and your family!
Thanks @Deiseach,
Some bailiffs and public defenders are still on the job, one of the defenders clients was confused by their building being closed “But how do I talk to my lawyer?”, I told him “It’s closed because of the plague” (I wasn’t sure whether to say “Whuhan” or “Corona”), and pointed to the phone number posted on the door, to which the client said “Oh I have his phone number, I guess I’ll call him”, further confirming an old deputies assessment of “It’s 80% cause of stupid” as to why inmates are in jail (leaving 20% for bad luck, crazy, and/or evil).
A couple of lawyers are wearing masks inside, but cops and bailiffs aren’t.
Yesterday at the supermarket about a fifth of the customers wore masks, and judging by that one supermarkets clientele about 50% of
San FranciscansLankhmarians are of Asian descent, and 30% are skinny young white men with beards (not what the census says!), not quite panic, but definitely urgency.Across the bridge in
OaklandGondor things looked pretty normal, but folks were running redlights inBerkeleyImrryr, and crossing that city was scary until I finally got home to Hobbiton@Plumber:
Lankhmar was explicitly Alexandria, Egypt.
@Le Maistre Chat,
In his early story “Adept’s Gambit” sure, but after his wife’s death Leiber moved to San Francisco where he wrote “Ill Met in Lankhmar“, and “The City of the black toga”/”The City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes” is infused by where Leiber lived in the later tales (though my ’70’s paperbacks insisted Lankhmar’s “Street of Gods” was inspired by Telegraph Avenue across the bay in Berkeley).
I invite you to read “From Lankhmar to the Tenderloin“, from a 1991 issue of Science Fiction Eye (which I first read from the print version in a corner of the Dark Carnival bookstore, which is where I met a very frail Fritz Leiber)
Restaurants are supposed to only provide take out
the coronavirus, even more than most things, will punish poor people. white collar workers will get to work from home. service workers will not. those who cannot afford to stockpile food will (I think) suffer. I wonder if this could kickstart a leftist revolution or at least an attempt at one, not immediately but in the next couple of years. many far leftists would love that to happen and could try to instigate one.
I highly doubt it.
I doubt it. Plagues generally get seen as exogenous and at any rate it’s more a failure of the Chinese health system than American. Also, living standards tend to rise for plague survivors once the disease burns itself through. And unskilled people will have access to some higher paying jobs due to disease risk in the short term. Wages are a negotiation and coronavirus increases working class bargaining power vis a vis purchasers of labor.
More broadly, revolutions tend to happen because of economic disruption, a weak state, and a lack of legitimacy. Anti-capitalist movements specifically tend to spawn directly as a result of economic disruption, which is why the 1920s was such a fertile time for Communism, Fascism, and other less remembered movements like the Social Credit types. And frankly, the last two decades have been pretty placid by comparison. 2008 was bad but the 1920s had a worse crisis than 2008 every other year for a decade.
I don’t know about the weak state part but we have the other two (or will soon).
Compared to early XX century Russia, you have none.
I seriously doubt you could even charitably describe the US state as weak. And I don’t think the economic disruption or lack of legitimacy is as severe as all that. (Keep in mind, it would be legitimacy of the US system, not Trump specifically.) Even if it were, a strong state with the other two is a recipe for a failed revolution.
I think a lot depends on how much the rich throw the poor to the wolves or not.
Mitt Romney is now publicly calling for Andrew Yang’s UBI proposal for the duration of the emergency, which is kind of a head trip in and of itself but is also a very smart move – if the poor are actually seen as taken care of as well as possible during the crisis I think that blunts a lot of the potential outrage.
The IRS (and SS) and state tax authorities know generally what everyone’s job is and how much their income generally is.
I’d much rather the poor with non-essential jobs get $2000, than everyone get $1000.
Not only is this cheaper, but it helps those who need the help the most.
If I got an extra $1000 it would go right into the bank, or at this point possibly right into the stock market. There would be no trickle down for those who need it.
Yeah, the only reason to do $1000 for everyone instead of the needy is that defining who the needy is highly controversial and takes resources.
There are a lot of people making median income, or more, that live paycheck to paycheck. They are arguably more in danger of permanent effects due to no pay than the poor. A poor person could just not pay the rent and suffer few consequences, a middle class person unable to pay the mortgage might have their whole life turned upside down.
This is understating the impact of not paying rent by rather a lot. Banks are also generally more willing to work with mortgage holders going through a temporary difficulty than landlords (banks aren’t actually eager for people to foreclose on homes, they would prefer to keep the mortgage payments coming in).
@acymetric : Landlords would rather not evict people either, because they’d rather keep the rent coming in. I agree with your overall conclusion, however, because banks have bigger pockets and can ride out the storm better than a lot of landlords.
I should have said “fewer” consequences. Obviously, losing out on your pay for even a month is a very trying thing for a lot of people. That said, neither one is going to be kicked out any time soon, so the next month the immediate issue isn’t a loss of housing. I was thinking of things like credit scores. If the lockdown goes past April, I’m not sure anyone will really be doing well.
Economic effects will hit the poor hardest, but the health effects will will be worst for the oldest, who tend to be wealthier. I guess this depends on your expectations about the course of the virus and response which will have the biggest impact.
You could imagine a cold-hearted leftist advocating for keeping businesses open both to support wages and to kill off the bourgeoisie/junkers/boomers/etc. but mostly the response has been calls for paid sick leave and other forms of monetary support.
Disease breakouts simply don’t lead to societal collapse in the absence of external invasion. We’ve seen this worldwide. Heck, the Black Death killed a third of Europe but didn’t collapse European governments.
The Native Americans that didn’t go to war with the United States mostly came out of the horrors of meeting European diseases for the first time pretty okay (e.g. the Pawnee), although again, you’re talking a massively powerful external force at the same time.
I may have forgotten one, but in a generic sense, massive disease epidemics are not societal transformers.
Can someone explain to me the rationale behind why someone in an American city or suburb (rather than out in the cut or somewhere where supply chain is otherwise unstable anyway) should stockpile food or really anything else right now?
If your tolerance for exposure risk is 0 or approaches 0. It isn’t that there will be no food, it is that you won’t want to go out to get more at the risk of catching the virus while you’re out.
*Outside chance of all stores being completely shuttered by government order, I suppose.
The number of people whose tolerance is 0 or near 0 (the elderly, people with serious illnesses, etc.) seems to be much smaller than the number of people stockpiling.
Alternative possibility: you’re worried that *you* might be forced into quarantine/isolation at which point you won’t be able to go out and get stuff.
In descending order of importance (IMO):
a. Having your kids home from school and university and nobody eating meals out/at the work cafeteria means you need a lot more food at home. Being stuck at home makes you want to do stuff like baking at home, too.
b. Things that are being panic-bought are potentially going to be out later, so you’d better buy them now so you’re not stuck with no toilet paper or no milk/bread/rice. If you see hand sanitizer or disinfecting wipes on the shelf, you should grab a bunch because you know you won’t have another chance to get them for awhile.
c. If the spread of COVID-19 continues, the risk of going shopping increases day by day. You’d be safer minimizing your shopping trips, but that means stocking up on stuff so you don’t have to go to a store half a dozen times next week.
d. The authorities may impose a shelter-in-place order that forbids you going out for anything but essentials, and maybe there’s stuff you’ll really wish you had.
e. The grocery stores near you may shut down or reduce hours due to lots of sick workers or inability to get supplied.
I wouldn’t say I’ve “stockpiled”, but I have bought way more than I normally would, and that was so I wouldn’t have to go back to the store for a couple of weeks, in the hopes of lowering my exposure.
We are gradually reducing our stockpile, combined with infrequent shopping trips.
If you’re sick, you should avoid going out in public. Grocery shopping tends to be done in public. You should therefore have enough stockpiled to be able to avoid going out while you’re recuperating.
This.
It isn’t to protect you from starving: it’s to protect other people from you needing to go buy groceries while sick.
But what if you’re not sick? Should we all be expecting that we’re going to get sick and that nobody else in our house will be able to go out and get groceries?
@Well…, yes, you should be prepared for the possibility you will get sick. And if you do get sick, everyone else in your house should be assuming they also have it and might be contagious even if they don’t yet show symptoms.
Let’s say I get sick then. Worst case scenario my wife goes grocery shopping with gloves and a facemask on, while I lie on the couch and supervise my kids’ hour of TV. I suppose I see why it’d be more expedient to stockpile, but I still don’t see the need for it, and I’m still confused about why the hoi polloi, who normally don’t do much in the way of prepping for outside chance scenarios, suddenly are willing to rush out and spend a bunch of extra money hoarding things that are probably still going to be available down the street.
My hypothesis is someone on Social Media said “if you’re smart you’ll do this” and that meme spread like a virus.
If you’re buying mostly things you would normally buy anyway, and if you are still able to consume them before they perish, you aren’t really spending any extra money or “hoarding” anything.
You’re just, like, pre-buying.
I mean sure, this is definitely a thing that happened. And then spread to mainstream media as the local news shows up in the parking lot of your Wal-Mart with a report on “EVERYONE IS BUYING STUFF! THERE’S NOT MUCH LEFT!” which makes it even worse.
But even so, pre-buying is never really a bad idea. There’s really no harm unless you’re buying excess perishables that will rot before you consume/freeze them.
+1
If this all blows over in a month, it will just be a little longer till we need to buy laundry detergent or rice or something–there’s not a big cost here! As long as you’re not buying weird stuff you’d never use, and you’re not buying stuff that will go bad before you use it, you should be fine.
@Well…
FYI, according to this:
and
How hard is it to call the police non-emergency number, state that you’re sick and in self-quarantine and have run out of groceries, and ask them to deliver some?
(A) Will the police in fact do that?
(B) If so, will they do that without embarrassing the person who called them, and without pretending they smelled drugs to get an excuse to search the person’s house?
(C) If so, will they pick out good groceries, abiding by the person’s dietary preferences?
(D) If so, does everyone know they’ll reliably do that?
I live a couple miles from Kirkland, in the center of the US outbreak. There’s a real possibility I’ll be sick and in self-quarantine any day now. And I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.
The only way to find out in advance is to call them in advance.
Given they are the legal authority responsible for enforcing quarantines, they have every incentive to do A, B and C.
Evan: Do you have friends of neighbors that can bring you groceries?
anonymousskimmer: The police will skip responsibility for this unless some other power forces them to.
@Edward Scizorhands
In which case call city hall, the fire department, the grocery store *itself* (who actually would be incentivized to deliver, even if they don’t have a delivery service).
Eventually you’ll talk to someone who is willing and able to help.
@Edward Scizorhands, yes, I personally have friends. And I’ve got a few weeks’ worth of groceries, so I don’t need to be a burden to them and expose them to my hypothetical viruses.
But “call the police” would not have even entered my mind, among other reasons because the local authorities haven’t ever mentioned it.
My grocery store does delivery. If you’re in self-quarantine, order the delivery and ask them to leave the groceries on the doorstep. That’s probably easier out here in the suburbs, though. I don’t know if I’d want anyone leaving my groceries outside in the city.
My grocery store does not deliver, I don’t have any friends in the area, and I live alone. My current plan is to just not get sick.
Hopefully such a call would start a chain of events ending in you getting groceries; also, hopefully it wouldn’t actually be an officer of the law showing up unless you live in Mayberry. Most likely they are either going to point you to the stores delivery line, or pass on your request to a local church or other service club. I know my church as mentioned having people volunteer for such.
@Conrad Honcho
You’re at home in quarantine. As long as they ring the doorbell or knock the groceries won’t spend more than 30 seconds on your doorstep.
I know, I was just thinking about the people who live on the sixth floor of buildings with multiple occupants. I hear they have a lot of problems with getting packages in general.
Are package thieves scared of Coronavirus? I wonder if anyone would dare steal a package off my porch if I had a big sign saying “QUARANTINED” on my door.
Also, so many people being stuck at home ruins the M.O. of porch pirates.
There is the non-trivial chance that your suburb may become a hot zone. Even if 1 in 1000 has it, you’re talking about a pretty high chance someone in the grocery store either today or yesterday had it.
Quite frankly at this point I’d be stockpiling ammo, because if you don’t get it now, there’s a non-trivial chance you won’t be able to get it for quite a while. Would rather not get caught with my pants down. There is a very low chance of actually needing it, but localized breakdowns of order can happen occasionally(though not often under pandemic), and it might take a day or four before the National Guard shows up.
It’s (hopefully) going to kickstart a shift towards a more socially-minded state.
There won’t be a collapse on the scale that leaves people starving. Not from this virus, and not if the state can do something about it. Which it obviously can, and which it will find much easier to actually do during an exogenous crisis.
For preludes to revolutions, look for wars.
I’ll tell you, I had to tell my technicians yesterday that they had to put in for vacation or sick time to get paid while they’re not allowed to go to work, and that did not go over well at all. (Especially since a few of them had already burned a lot of sick time earlier in the year on family emergencies and, you know, the health problems that already come with being elderly.)
Someone on the radio mentioned applying for unemployment at this time? Is that really a viable option, since they’re not actually laid off? Could they apply for part time work (since it seems that grocery is now in a place to hire, the local Costco was definitely increasing hours)?
For unemployment the thing to look up is called “constructive dismissal” and I think it varies by state. It most commonly comes up when someone’s hours are cut back severely to the point they have been effectively laid off.
Question about talking to roommates about coronavirus: how do I give my housemate the coronavirus talk? She doesn’t seem to be taking it seriously, is inviting (very social) people over and going out. She thinks I’m over-reacting to coronavirus; at the same time she says she “understands abstractly” that it will grow exponentially, etc., but “can’t conceptualize it”. We have a good relationship and I don’t want to waste my “weird credit” with my roommate or she’ll ignore me, but my girlfriend’s parents live in the same city and we’re freaking out. For context, roommate is a 30yo CS/stem person, international, wealthy, non-political but organic/hipster-leaning.
Maybe show her stories about what it’s like in Italian hospitals?
That’s what worked for me. When I explained to my family that Italy is basically a sneak peak of where we are likely to be in a week or two, that got their attention.
I’ve seen lots of people saying this, but I don’t understand why. We had our first cases before Italy did, we were actually ahead of them in deaths for a bit.
https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1239324428623847424
We’re simply not seeing a similar curve.
I mentioned this same issue downthread. You get a similar curve between U.S. and Italy if you call day 1 for each of the U.S. and Italy at something like 150 cases. If you set day 1 for each based on 1 case or 10 cases, you get wildly different curves between the countries.
Basically, in the 52 days since the U.S. confirmed it’s first case, there is a 12 day period of confirmed cases that matches a section of Italy’s confirmed cases.
I don’t think either exercise is terribly instructive, as discrepancies in testing rates gives me very little confidence in the ‘confirmed cases’ data.
The curves are not exactly exponential, so you can nudge the result in the direction you want by choosing the right metric.
Judging by the tweets, if your metric is “how many deaths X days after death #1”, USA is better than Italy; if your metric is “how many deaths X days after death #100”, Italy is better than USA. The second metric seems a bit more robust to me maybe, but I suppose the proper conclusion is that the curves are very similar.
(Note: here I am blindly trusting the arguments made in the tweets; I didn’t verify the numbers myself.)
By the way, speaking about misleading statistics, I wonder how much young people should feel comfortable after learning that almost all deaths were very old people, when the fact is that many people in Italy die because the hospitals are overwhelmed, there are fewer respirators than people who desperately need them, and in triaging old age counts against you. In other words: we decide not to spend scarce resources on old people, and then report the outcome as “well, old people are simply more likely to die from the coronavirus” as a force of nature.
(I assume that old people would still be more likely to die even if resources were allocated by fair lottery. But the ratio could be less overwhelming… the question is, how much.)
if your metric is “how many deaths X days after death #100”, Italy is better than USA.
AFAIK, the U.S. hasn’t yet hit 100 deaths.
Might be a testing issue.
That data tracks deaths, not cases. Cases are more important as they indicate the number of hospital beds needed. Italy is likely seeing more deaths than average due to the lack of medical treatment available.
Luckily the US has a much higher ICU bed capacity than Italy. That will buy you a few more days.
I threw this together last night to track per capita cases:
https://twitter.com/SmackTrout/status/1239597054852096005
“First confirmed infection” is a data set of one. “100th confirmed infection” is a data set of 100. Given that we don’t perfectly observe cases, “Case #100” is a better point of comparison than “Case #1”. Not perfect, (or even necessarily good or useful, given the vagaries of testing and asymptomatic cases) but better.
I’m actually less interested in whether the specific graphs between Italy and the US line up, and more in the fact that a bunch of medical experts keep saying the US is in the exponential growth stage and we’re almost certainly going to wildly overrun our hospital capacity in some regions of the country the same way Northern Italy did.
The lack of testing probably does mean that exercises in trying to line up confirmed US cases against anything are futile because that’s an almost meaningless number.
I sort of agree, but I do kinda think the testing portion of this has been way overblown. The testing kits in South Korea have extremely high false negative rates (some places have it quoted as high as 49% false negative), but they are able to contain it well with the other measures really pulling the weight much more. Testing is helpful in that it helps us measure if we are winning or not, but it doesn’t really help you win, and in the case of some of the tests, it could actually be anti-helpful if the false negative rates are really as high as some estimates.
Which is why deaths are the most significant, because deaths (unlike cases), can’t be misread (either good or bad) by tests.
If the US does in fact have five times the number of cases that we think, that’s good news, because it means it’s substantially less virulent here (for whatever reason).
Because at the end of the day, all we really care about is preventing Americans from dying. The number who get a moderately bad chest cold is basically irrelevant. The number of total cases matter because x% need constant medical care for a couple of weeks and recover, and if we do become overwhelmed, some of those may die who otherwise wouldn’t have.
@EchoChaos
We also care about permanent disability.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/02/here-is-what-coronavirus-does-to-the-body/
@anoymousskimmer
I don’t disagree. But those are almost certainly related numbers.
Dude, this kind of thing is why you build up your weird credits in the first place. If you aren’t going to cash them in now, what exactly are you waiting for?
Also yes, this. If you use your weirdness points in places where you will soon be proved correct, you don’t become a weirdo, you become a prophet. Use your points, dammit.
Seconded. If you’re a “prophet” not only did you not end up spending them, but you will get a great allotment for the next thing.
I read it as “I am willing to spend my weird credits, but I only get one chance to spend them, so help me do it right.”
I think there’s a three-part thing to do. One, show her the McCardle story in the WashPost about how exponential growth means there isn’t any warning except the warning you (may) get from public health officials who understand exponential growth. Two, show her the list of tech clubs that have canceled everything (listed at https://stayinghome.club). Three, show her the latest out of Italy, ideally something with a few numbers, like 1000 deaths / day or what not, but mostly with the visceral story of doctors deciding who to save.
Maybe also think about who in her life is in an especially vulnerable demographic, and get her better angels on your side. She can save a life as a blood donor, but only if she’s healthy. She can do a lot for small businesses she cares about by buying from their online stores (especially gift cards she will not use for a while), and encouraging others likewise, but only if she’s healthy enough. She can be available to go nurse relative-that-she-cares-about if they get sick, and drive them to a hospital and stay with them if the hospital can’t see them right away, but she can only do that if she’s healthy enough herself to get around.
Right. The answer to “I can’t conceptualize it” is “you don’t have to, the very worried public health officials can.”
Do you know where this McArdle story is? Google is failing me. (She’s written too much about it I guess.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/10/coronavirus-what-matters-isnt-what-you-can-see-what-you-cant/
Thanks!
(Edit: already said)
show her a chart.
This video comparing Italian newspaper obituary pages before and after the rise of the epidemic made it visceral for me in a way that exponential curves did not.
True story: On Friday night, my right leaning brother in law thought it was a massive overreaction and was loaded to the gills with common flu and H1N1 statistics. On Saturday morning, we saw him again, after he had gone to the CDC website, which apparently includes a possible death range of 250,000+, and he’s now a convert.
My sister is mostly frustrated that there wasn’t a day or two where he was somewhere in the middle.
“If we have no chance to prepare, it is hitting about 200 million people at around a 1% death rate. 2 million dead people is a lot. That’s a 1/3 Holocaust just in the US.”
No one is as zealous as a convert.
30yo CS/stem person
Does she like spreadsheets? I saw this google doc some place
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lxbx2FI2Jq-VpPLRSSeUlVe9X1CewL046cLzNHWlGZ4/edit?usp=sharing
I don’t know if that will help or hurt, showing that dropping from 25% to 20% 10 days earlier buys us 2 or 3 extra days at the end.
Probably play around with that and copy it or edit it to make the numbers stark enough.
Start violently coughing the next time she has very social people over. /s
Counterpoint to what I just said above: What i’m seeing here (and in China) might suggest that it’s maybe more the middle class that wins, while the upper extremes and lower and lower-middle classes both get hosed.
We all have to deal with terrible bosses in our lives, but substantially *NONE* of the middle and upper class folks I know have had to deal with a boss specifically ordering them TO come into work. I’m in law school, and maximum slack has set in here: because we’re mostly all privileged elites, we know that everyone can take a break for a few weeks, nothing will burn down or close up, and we can get back to work whenever things resume. Our seats are still available. Meanwhile my friends in the delivery business are being told to keep working, and many are afraid of losing their jobs.
Similarly, what i’m seeing in my social network in the east looks a lot like what you’re seeing in italy: the already-comfortable are locking themselves in their apartment and playing video games and stuff. the previously-uncomfortable are starting to worry they’ll get left behind like in 2008, when this whole thing blows over. In 15 years, when everyone has forgotten when the coronavirus happened, exactly, this period could just look like a job termination followed by a resume gap, and that stuff sticks with you.
Not sure if anyone has posted this here, but I thought this deck was very informative:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DqfSnlaW6N3GBc5YKyBOCGPfdqOsqk1G/view
Alt link
Dr. Lin’s twitter
It had a lot of the data and analysis that (IMO) should be being broadcast and discussed on the 24-hour networks. He’s does a decent job at pointing out areas of knowledge where there is lots of uncertainty and where there is less uncertainty and what useful data we have. (Mostly from Wuhan and the Diamond Princess.)
At the end, he even gives you a home-bake recipe for hand sanitizer!
I have a friend who lives in a major American city that is in a pretty general lockdown for the next few weeks at least. He has been making most of his living driving for Uber, but demand for that has already dropped significantly. I have suggested that he look into Door Dash, Instacart, etc. as he already has a car and demand for delivery might be higher than for Uber. Are there any other suggestions I can give him?
Possibly offer to pick up groceries for people? If he can sanitize things like the exterior of bottles/jugs/cans he could offer a service to pick up those types of goods, sanitize them and then deliver them to people.
Here a hypermarket already rations delivery for old or sick people because of the spike in demand. Perhaps ask a local hypermarket with delivery service if they are hiring delivery men.
Is a “hypermarket” a thing in the Anglosphere? I’ve only seen the term used in Russia (гипермаркет).
UK English would be “supermarket”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a native English speaker from anywhere use “hypermarket”, though Wikipedia does have a page for it. French “hypermarché” is definitely a thing, though.
I think I’ve seen “hypermarket” in the US, but it’s much less common than “superstore” or “big box” or just “Walmart” or “Target.”
Imagine a small town wants to boost their economy. They decide to elect a dog to the position of mayor. The dog is elected, and on paper at least he is the mayor. (All actually important mayoral duties are carried out by a more quietly-elected human.) After a rush of national interest, a few local businesses change their names to reflect that “this is the town where we have a dog for our mayor”. As tourists pour in, more economic activity grows out of this novelty governmental arrangement. Additional hotels and restaurants open, producing new jobs and opportunities. People move and settle in the town and it receives the boost it wanted.
Is there a term for this variation on the broken window fallacy? (And, is it actually one?)
That’s just a publicity stunt.
It would be broken windows fallacy if they actually tried to enact the dog’s policies somehow, and then pointed to economic activity that flourished in mitigating the harm done when they killed all the squirrels, cats, and small birds.
That depends. If Mayor Dog decreed bringing in more squirrels or cats so the dog residents could have more fun chasing them, there might be a net positive benefit despite some squirrels and cats getting caught.
It doesn’t sound like a broken window fallacy, more or less its a zero sum game. The ‘town with a dog for its mayor’ becomes a tourist attraction and brings dollars in, but those dollars generally are going to come from other tourist attractions receiving fewer visitors.
It isn’t zero sum. The reason the tourists come is that they enjoy visiting a town with a dog for a mayor, enjoy it more than wherever they would otherwise have gone, which is a benefit.
But unless the visitors increase their tourism, the towns which they would otherwise have visited lose their custom. Only if more people overall go touristing because of the town with the dog-mayor will it be a positive-sum change.
No, as the issue is one of allocative efficiency. Note that even your alternative example would probably fall into that category (you seem to have conflated diversion of funds to tourist activities with expanded consumption in that case, so it is hard to say precisely).
If you assume that tourists want a specific thing such as ‘I want to see a dog that is mayor’ and value that more than specific thing #2, such as ‘failing to see a dog as mayor I want to see a cat a mayor’ then yes. My guess is that what is being sold here is novelty, not highly specific wants that were previously unsatisfied by the market.
It’s not a fallacy. It could actually work for the first town that tried it. Much less likely to work for the second and such third towns…
This is like the New Yorker cartoon contest. I’m trying to think of the perfect dog-related pun to sum up the situation, but sadly, I’m more of a cat person.
“Christ, what an asshole.”
If the mayor dog is female, there’s another word you could use to describe her.
This is apparently a thing in Japan – it’s called nekonomics according to Wikipedia. Famous example here.
This is the diversity we need.
What about Skimbleshanks?
I do not know, but electing a dog mayor does not seem much crazier than appointing a cat railroad station master:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tama_(cat)
Supposedly a smashing success for the station:
The publicity from Tama’s appointment led to an increase in passengers by 17% for that month as compared to January 2006; ridership statistics for March 2007 showed a 10% increase over the previous financial year. A study estimated that the publicity surrounding Tama has contributed 1.1 billion yen to the local economy. Tama is often cited as part of a phenomenon known in Japan as Nekonomics (ネコノミクス, nekonomikusu, lit. cat economy), a play off the term Abenomics. Nekonomics refers to the positive economic impact of having a cat mascot.
So, on second thought, perhaps the proper term is “inunomics”.
The real life version is giving your town a stupidly long name.
Relative numbers for SARS-CoV-2 for the general public.
World (scroll to Current COVID-19 test coverage estimates)
(Also good: frequency of the symptoms)
Germany
Any other maps/dashboards?
John Hopkins world map
Worldometers (has rates per million people)
Italy (like the German one, it seems based on the John Hopkins software)
I keep seeing the notion that the U.S. is 10-11 days behind Italy. This is based on the number of cases that Italy had on 2/23 compared to the U.S. on 3/5. I have seen this thought in several different versions.
This seems off to me for several reasons.
First, why is the comparison based on total case load rather than a percentage of population?
Second, the U.S. had it’s first case a week before Italy and, until Feb. 22, had more cases than Italy. It was only after this that the Italy numbers took off.
Is there any insightful thought process behind the notion that the “U.S. is 10-11 days behind Italy” other than arbitrarily selecting portions of the case load curve that are superficially similar? Doing this requires ignoring a significant portion of the U.S. case load data. Is there reason to believe that, given the relatively close match in the curves for the cited portion, the U.S. will follow Italy’s trajectory going forward?
Or is the point of this comparison meant to be a cautionary tale that can be consumed quickly on Facebook and Twitter?
I do think the media is struggling to contextualize things for us, in part because there remains tons of uncertainty about exactly how screwed we are. (It could be ‘Not much’!)
We don’t really have any “useful” comparisons for our current situation because of (1) differences in the number and frequency of our tests, (2) differences in our interventions and their timings, (3) differences in our demographics, and (4) differences in our population structures.
We’re much bigger than Italy and Spain, so one-to-one comparisons don’t seem particularly apt. We’re roughly the same size as Europe (depending how you slice it) but have half as many people. But we do have tons of people in dense cities. But those cities aren’t as dense as most population centers in Europe. But we tend to be older. We have outbreaks across the whole country, not heavily localized (as in China). We had very little testing for weeks (unlike Korea) and haven’t been able to control and track individual outbreaks, leading to (apparent) large-scale community transmission (unlike Japan or Singapore).
So there aren’t really any one-to-one analogues out there, AFAIK.
We also don’t know how effective social distancing campaigns will do in the US relative to other countries that have tried them. It appears that institutions (sports leagues, many employers, etc.) are successfully implementing policies to eliminate the most egregious opportunities for transmission, but I think the populace writ large is confused about what they should be doing. This adds further uncertainty about how successful, both about the efficacy of this type of countermeasure and the timing for their uptake.
What this means is huge uncertainty bounds around projections. In the case of exponential growth, this means multiple orders of magnitude in your error bounds. Personally, I’m at “between 1,000 and 1 million dead” for my 90% bounds. (And in the space of writing this, I went from 99% to 95% to what you see now.) I’m sure the experts have better data and have built some useful mathematical models, but I don’t know that they’re going to be able to give estimate that are too much more precise than the above. Most of this shit is just unknown.
All that said, I think the “two weeks behind Italy” thing is in reference to the parts of the curve where exponential growth became apparent, but I don’t really know.
All of this makes sense.
The official numbers are probably pretty confounded by the lack of testing and awareness initially.
I took another look at the numbers, comparing U.S., Spain, Germany, and Italy on three day centers (because that happens to be how I jotted down the data).
Each of these four countries shows pretty similar percentage increases every three days (something like 1.7x every three days). The difference is that both Italy and Spain each had 6 day periods where there was a massive spike (maybe due to increased testing?).
But then there is reason to believe that, due to the stress on their health care systems, Italy and Spain have gotten behind in testing again and there real increase rate is higher.
Given how sensitive the exponential growth timeline is to that rate of growth and how difficult it is to figure out that rate of growth, I’m taking the claim as a cautionary tale rather than an actual prediction.
Conclusion: not enough data for me to draw a conclusion, but I’m skeptical of the 10-11 days behind Italy claim for all of the potentially confounding reasons (and more) listed above.
For the initial period of exponential growth, the total size of the population doesn’t matter. Exponential growth is what you expect when the rate of additional transmissions is proportional to the number of infected people, without any corrections for saturating the number of people infected, double counting people who become infected from multiple sources, or having people already infected travel to the country. The cross over to community transmission as the major source of infection is why the early numbers are not exponential and not very comparable. The fact that the data fits exponential growth suggests these factors aren’t very important (which in turn means there’s still a lot of potential growth). Reporting I’ve seen suggests that if we get to the point where it does saturate it would be catastrophic (~million deaths).
If you want to rescale by population it would increase the ‘number of days behind’ by about 6, but it wouldn’t change the time constant of the growth.
The density of cases will be important in terms of local healthcare capacity (5,000 extra ICU cases is a disaster in the bay area, but a fluctuation across the country as a whole). This would show up as a different mortality rate, but in a way obviously dependent on the details of healthcare capacity and how the cases are distributed.
zzzzort makes the good case for caring about total numbers: 1 lily pad will grow to 2 lilies pad will grow to 4 lilies pad no matter how big the pond is.
But for things like disease spread, density and network effects really do matter. 1 sick person in a community of 100 isn’t the same as 1000 sick people in a community of 100,000, which is different from 1 million sick people in a community of 100 million. Those latter situations are much worse despite having equal proportions.
But being spread out helps, too. 100 out of 10,000 people in Seattle being sick doesn’t scare me much if I’m on the East coast. I will never directly interact with them.
The period when there were only a handful of cases is not very informative, because it is influenced too much by random chance. E.g. in Italy, the first 3 known cases were quickly isolated and didn’t spread. The main outbreak was independent of them, and started (or at least was discovered) several weeks later.
That thinking seems accurate, but I’m not certain it’s complete. Consider the following:
1) What is the number of cases that should be used to make a comparison of timelines? The common comparison with Italy is 150 cases. Why this number and not 25 or 400?
2) Given the initial restrictions on testing (at least in the U.S.), how much of our data is driven by infection rates and how much is driven by testing availability?
The period when there were only a handful of cases is not very informative, because it is influenced too much by random chance.
Right. You’d need a day with the same relative (I sense a growing obsession with that) numbers of infected, corrected by the relative number of tests done by then. Then, maybe, some meaningful differences in curves may be seen.
You just need enough cases that the trend empirically fits an exponential. If you use 400 you get the same result.
Looking for contrarian and/or counter-intuitive Covid-19 thoughts/arguments. They don’t have to be novel, but just ones that people aren’t talking about as much.
For example…
Regarding quarantining, shut-downs, etc., I’m seeing a lot of people saying “better to over-react than under-react.” They say this without considering the massive economic fallout of overreaction. There is massive economic fallout to under-reaction and just-the-right-amount-reaction as well, of course.
On the guy with all the sanitizer – if he bought that sanitizer from random markets in the middle of nowhere and assisted in distributing it to parts of the country where it couldn’t be found, he was doing a real service. I don’t know enough of the details to know whether he was doing this – but there is a real and significant difference between price-gouging and arbitrage.
I saw an analysis that suggested that Covid-19 saved an order of magnitude more lives than it took in China, due to the reduction in pollution.
I don’t know if it’s counterintuitive, but the fact that millions (tens of millions?) of people are going to be working from home over the next couple of months is going to have a huge effect on attitudes vis-a-vis teleworking and urban decentralization. As in, “hey, if I can work from home for this NYC company, why do I have to live in NYC and pay NYC rent?”
Good point – a friend of mine also pointed out the following:
Half of the nation’s school children are at home right now. What if they find out they learn better at home? My kids have assignments from their teachers, but no actual lessons as of yet.
You’re assuming that expanded telecommuting will in fact work just as well as regular commuting.
If it doesn’t, millions (tens of millions?) of people are going to find that they’ve been quietly sidelined from key decisionmaking processes by the core meatspace team, resulting in a realignment of de facto leadership vs. individual contributor roles. With lots of complaining by the people on the short end of that stick.
Right, but what if key members of the core meatspace team also work remotely? I have encountered that situation at other jobs.
Maybe, to phrase what I said better, managers and staff who haven’t worked from home for years (or ever) will discover in the coming weeks how sophisticated modern teleworking has become. Not perfect, by any means, but much better than the state of the art five or ten years ago, and supported by a much more entrenched high-speed internet infrastructure.
The definition of “core meatspace team” is the ones that aren’t working remotely.
There will be some environments where literally everyone is remotely, or everyone save the nominal manager to the same effect. But if there’s three people in the same room, then they’ll have an easier time coming to a consensus than any of the online participants, because body language etc matter and the sophisticated teleworking systems are as you note not by any means perfect at substituting for that.
Depending on how strong that effect is, the set of people in the office (even if it isn’t the nominal manager) could wind up making all the decisions and getting all the credit because everyone else sees themselves as lone dissenters to an established consensus. Still making useful individual contributions, but leadership and related power dynamics rearranged by the new circumstances.
I dunno, I can imagine a situation where one mid-level employee acts as the core meatspace nexus for a distributed leadership team. Kind of like Tank in the first Matrix movie.
(Though it occurs to me that if one employee is the meatspace nexus, he is by definition “not” the meatspace nexus, since he can presumably do his job anywhere outside HQ. Call it the Meatspace Paradox.)
Right, but what if key members of the core meatspace team also work remotely?
I asked my brother about this – could he not work from home? And he said he could, except it doesn’t work for what he has to do (production management in pharma manufacturing). They have to be on-site because you really can’t run bulk manufacturing remotely (right this minute, they can’t manufacture paracetamol fast enough because of the demand, plus the disruption to their supply chains).
So there are definitely jobs where it’s “I have a work laptop and technically I could be doing all this paper-shuffling at home but in reality I need to be on-site to oversee things or else”.
You’re assuming that expanded telecommuting will in fact work just as well as regular commuting.
For this, the infrastructure needs a little more resources.
My intuition is that most people have their productivity bottlenecked by their conscientiousness, and that commuting to an office is one of the only ways most of these people can keep it together enough to be productive.
So we could learn the wrong lesson from this. Responding to a crisis also increases conscientiousness. Maybe everybody works from home just brilliantly, but when the crisis passes and we try to continue working from home, it flounders.
I was already a fully remote worker and my productivity has crashed because I cannot help reading up about coronavirus every time I am at a computer.
I think for both WFH and schools, it’s not going to matter much. Those who oppose it don’t really care much if it works. NYC companies often aren’t willing to do expansion just outside NYC even when there’s no reason that wouldn’t work and offices are half the rent. (there was some post 9/11 expansion to Jersey City, but financial companies moved only their lower-paid back-office people there). For schools it might make a difference on the margin with homeschooling, but that’s about it.
I would agree with you if we were talking about the people who truck bottled water into disaster zones after a hurricane or something and jack up the prices. If it were not for their actions, there would be no water, so, sure the “price gouging” incentivizes people to fill a need that would otherwise not be met. For the hand sanitizer guy, he’s the one creating the shortage by buying it all up. Not the same thing.
Agreed if he actually created a shortage – do we know he did? Or is this just piling on?
There is certainly is a world in which buying all of the sanitizer in Walmarts throughout some rural section of the country and selling it to San Franciscans via Amazon is a net good and not a net bad.
Agreed if he actually created a shortage – do we know he did?
. . . Maybe?
People pointed out in the last thread that he’s a very very small part of the market.
But when he says that his strategy was to buy up every single bottle he could find, yes, at some point he is causing the panic.
Stores need to stop people from clearing out their stock.
You’re positing some kind of EMH violation by suggesting Walmart was leaving money on the ground with suboptimal logistics for some random guy to pick up.
Wal-mart knew they would be visited by men with guns if they started charging $20 for a bottle of hand sanitizer. even if that was the efficient market-clearing price. This guy, thought he could get away with it. If he had, then that would in one sense have made the market more efficient (but see elsewhere about increased transaction costs eating up most or all or more than all of those gains.
As John Schilling points out, the market is being made inefficient by the price-gouging laws that are more easily enforced against Walmart than random scalpers, but there’s another angle to it.
If there were no price gouging laws and Walmart started charging $50 per bottle of hand sanitizer, people would hate it: Walmart would be trading goodwill with customers for a relatively small profit (the margins would be huge, but hand sanitizer is a tiny amount of their total volume). It’s possible that trade is not worth making i.e. it would cost them too much long-term profit as angered customers find elsewhere to buy their widgets. If Bob Gougeman buys up all Walmart’s hand sanitizer and sells it a huge markup, he’s facing the same reputation vs money tradeoff, but Bob’s reputation is way less valuable than Walmart’s: with $100k of profit, he can afford for people to hate him.
93 is largely correct, the difference has a lot to do with scalpers looking for one off profits and Wal-Marts looking for decades of profits across thousands of items.
Which is why the government should mandate price increases!
Wow, that’s… usually people use the term “galaxy brain” sarcastically, but that’s actually kind of brilliant. I’m not saying it would definitely work, but I really want to see it tried. It’s like a unicorn, a case where price controls might actually make markets more efficient!
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit as a see people complain about price gougers, and I keep thinking we need more of them, and what I came up with is that stores should charge the normal price for the first x number of the item in question, and then each item after that goes up in price. It seems that would satisfy both the people that have the gut feeling that price gouging is wrong, and would also preserve a large amount of the benefits gouging gives you.
I like this idea. It’s amazing how easily panic-buyers are put off by higher prices. If they can buy it all now and use it up over time, why not buy it all? But if they have to pay double, they won’t do it. I was just at the grocery store and a lot of stuff was out of stock, but the fancy/expensive stuff was still available.
You’d somehow have to make allowances for those who buy for a large family, group, neighbours, etc. And then you need controls for cheaters.
I don’t think you really would need that. For someone that really needs the item, they would be able to bring a family member along to double their amount, pay the inflated rate on the extras, or they would be able to go to a few different stores. It would be an inconvenience, sure, but not insurmountable. Also, you really wouldn’t have to worry about people trying to game the system because the whole mechanism is based around making it more difficult to buy extras, not impossible. So, if someone wants to spend all day driving around from store to store buying a single pack of toilet paper at each, more power to them. They won’t be able to buy enough to really dent the supply.
The appropriate comparison would be how many lives would be lost to corona if they didn’t shut everything down.
It’s better to overreact than underreact because the more precautions we take, the sooner we can contain it and get everything back to normal. That doesn’t mean every place should shutdown everything indefinitely but it does mean err on the side of overreacting.
I think it’s probably at that time where it’s contrarian to say I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as everyone thinks. Yes, that big exponential line is scary but that is sustained when no measures are taken. South Korea has shown that taking it seriously fast enables you to contain it. China has shown that drastic action does the same thing. Western governments are not as proactive as the former and less willing to take the actions of the latter. But it’s a difference in degree. So I think they’ll be able to get a hold of the Coronavirus before it gets to those really big scary numbers, but the lag is going to be more costly. But that’s more of a contrarian, tentative take than a confident prediction.
I tend to agree that overreaction is better than underreaction, because it’s easier to recover from overreaction.
I’m more getting at the point that I’m not seeing great analysis of the very real downsides to overreaction. In my facebook social sphere, people are seeing overreaction as “I didn’t get to go to a party or see a movie, and now I feel a bit embarassed because I stocked up on all this food,” and not “I lost my job because the restaurant closed and now I can’t make rent.”
Unfortunately, the more precautions we take, the sooner we will find ourselves highly motivated to reason “It has been contained and we can get everything back to normal” even though it almost certainly hasn’t.
I’m seeing a lot of precautions being tentatively claimed as two-week or through-the-end-of-the-month things; that’s not going to be enough to eradicate the virus, and it’s probably not going to be enough to knock it down to the level that what should have been normal public-health measures can keep it contained. And it’s probably not the real plan, it’s the home contractor’s “two weeks” which has nothing to do with how long they really expect it to take to remodel your home and everything to do with what they expect will get you to shut up and go along with the program until they say oops, it’s going to be another two weeks. See also the thirty-minute airline flight delay.
But, unlike airline pilots who already have you strapped into their airplane with the full power of the FAA behind them, these are elected officials – many of whom are standing for re-election in November. “He kept us all on lockdown for two months, when they promised two weeks and the TV news told us things had turned around in two weeks”, is not a winning campaign slogan.
So we need a reaction that is properly calibrated to be both effective and sustainable. Overreaction and underreaction are both potential killers on this one.
I think even two months is optimistic. One article (https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727) claimed that flattening the curve would take ten years.
Since we don’t have any better guesses, I’m going to quote the Revelations 9 which predicts five months. Crowned locusts is close enough to a coronavirus for me.
1The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss. 2When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss. 3And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. 4They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. 5They were not allowed to kill them but only to torture them for five months. And the agony they suffered was like that of the sting of a scorpion when it strikes. 6During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.
7The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces. 8Their hair was like women’s hair, and their teeth were like lions’ teeth. 9They had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. 10They had tails with stingers, like scorpions, and in their tails they had power to torment people for five months. 11They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek is Apollyon (that is, Destroyer).
12The first woe is past; two other woes are yet to come.
The point of the article is not that flattening the curve will take ten years, so we’re all doomed. He’s critiquing that idea. It’s dangerous to try and do these mitigation efforts that stop the disease. Instead, we should be implementing aggressive containment efforts:
Western countries are failing but at some point, they are going to take more aggressive counter measures(indeed, it’s already started in some places). That’s why I think it’s going to be worse than China but not apocalyptic.
I’m not sure why it’s inevitable that this is going to last as long as you’re suggesting when South Korea has managed to control it without any lockdowns.
Presumably because South Korea managed to prevent the virus from spreading unchecked in the first place.
Somewhat cynically, I also think people in the US are in a bit more hysterics over it than S.K.
I don’t expect things to start operating vaguely normal again here until there are 0 new reported cases for at least a couple weeks (note that this is different than seeing a decrease in total cases).
I have really been chafing at this, and China released some economic data this morning so I’ll post it now.
It is premature to say that China has shown dramatic action stops the virus until they get back up and running. The data they reported pretty clearly shows that their approach is short term at best. Retail sales were down 20%+ y/y, and industrial production fell 13.5%, in the US during the GFC retail sales fell 14% and industrial production fell 17%, so we are looking at a decline in one month that was as large as the 2 year decline during the financial crisis in the US (probably worse really since China was reporting growth of 6% 2019). I wouldn’t be surprised if these numbers were worse than the worst months of the Great Depression and there is no expectation of a quick recovery as China’s trade partners are going into lock-down/recession now. ‘We stopped the virus’ would be a cold comfort if they also kicked off a major depression to do so.
It also assumes that China’s numbers are accurate and they have actually stopped the spread. I believe that they have several major cities still on lockdown.
Did the math for Bucharest and ended up with 1200 lives a year. If fewer die due to COVID19 in the city, we’re in the black.
Started with a facebook political ad that said “pollution in Bucharest is claiming 4 years of everybody’s life”. Which sounds… reasonable, for the highest polluted city in Europe. Took a lifespan of 80 years and a population of 2 million and that’s what I ended up with. 1200 deaths a year due to long term pollution for that population… sounds sane.
Don’t know about contrarian, but at least the silver-linings I’m rooting for:
-Working from home (as already mentioned). Better for workers and better for the environment.
-Alternatives to meatspace conferences and seminars, which in my field lead to a lot of travel.
-Better hand washing practices generally, which might make the next few flu seasons better.
-Permanently expanded sick leave. Better for workers, and better for public health.
-Movement from toilet paper to bidets. Toilet paper is a gross concept, people.
And in the outcomes I’m definitely not rooting for, but which may come to pass:
-Fewer old people in critical positions. I think the world would be a better place if politicians and business leaders weren’t so old.
-Lower cost of medicare and social security.
-Redistribution of wealth, especially housing, from retirees.
My wife got us an electric bidet for the master bath in our new house. You just press a button and it sprays you with warm water, runs a fan to dry, the whole works. It’s amazing. It’s like having your ass gently scrubbed by angels. Highly recommend.
I had a bidet, but I still had to use toilet paper. Maybe if it’s got an industrial strength blower and you just let the fan run… I don’t know.
Generally, people figuring out how to do things without having to meet in person is good for us introverts.
I’d like to see my union’s semi-yearly convention go virtual. More people could attend that way.
I do not fucking trust bidets to stay clean. You ever look at a drinking fountain directly? And didn’t the studies show that air hand dryers aren’t very sanitary compared to paper towels?
Theoretically you would clean the bidet when you clean your bathroom. Do you trust your water faucets to stay clean?
Water fountains aren’t inherently gross, its just that nobody ever actually bothers to clean them.
You think that all janitors and restaurant staff are gonna keep those bidets clean enough?
Drinking fountains generally just have scale, which is not unsanitary. Generally if you look at the underside of a faucet you’ll see the same thing.
To me, the idea of getting poop on my leg and being asked to clean it with just some dry toilet paper is viscerally unpleasant.
I’ve been using toilets for twenty years and never gotten poop on my leg.
I’ve always thought that if it were any other part of my body besides my butt that I got poop on, “just wipe it with some paper” would not be sufficient.
@Conrad Honcho
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I guess I’ll clean poop off with just toilet paper regardless of the location, now. A real time saver!
@Nick
As @Conrad Honcho points out, I think @zzzz(z.*)ort’s post was intended to point out that you are definitely getting poop on you somewhere, and for some reason we are much more tolerant of poor cleaning in that particular place than we would be about poop literally anywhere else, including probably mere inches away in either direction.
The idea that the bidet won’t result in poop-tinged water remaining on your skin (sliding down your bare legs when you stand up) that you have to wipe away with something anyways sure is optimistic. With dry-wiping, unless your shit was already more liquid than solid, you have confidence that you know where where any remnant are after you wipe (your crack or your hands), and it’s not getting spread to a greater area by lowering its viscosity, or splashing that you can’t control.
What’s the name for the phenomenon where everyone runs to loudly shout that their preferred policy would’ve prevented today’s crisis de jure?
For the current pandemic, Sanders folks are yelling for Medicare for All, nationalists are crying for more border controls and onshoring, introverts are asking for more work from home and social distancing, etc.
This is not actually a post about whether any of these specific measures would work (although the subthread may end up being about that), but just a look at the “never let a crisis go to waste” phenomenon.
Opportunism?
It’s called “opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one.”
Sorry, stuck in the house with the kids (for two months, I’m guessing) and not in the best mood.
If I can suggest a term: “hobby horse derby.”
The only downside is that a search online reveals that that’s apparently a real thing.
I love this term, thanks.
I really like that. Stolen.
The Onion had a great article on this long ago (I think just post 9/11) with a headline like “This Crisis Demonstrates Why We Must Enact My Preferred Policies”. Sadly I can’t find it either on their site or by Google search.
There was an article, possibly from the Onion, about how people though 9/11 might the policies people already wanted should be enacted, or possibly that it was evidence for theories they already held.
What’s the name for the phenomenon where everyone runs to loudly shout that their preferred policy would’ve prevented today’s crisis de jure?
“I’m the only one who can see the Emperor’s got no clothes!”
Assuming we’re talking about people doing that today, I call it “Monday”.
I’m talking in general, but of course this is inspired by our ongoing visit from Corona-chan.
Politics
I’m in one of the areas that started a really severe lockdown this week. Schools, shops and bars closed, all events cancelled, borders closed…
If you had asked me a month ago, I’d have said “there’s no way this is going to happen here, the government can’t do that”. But now it’s just like “eh, I guess we’re all Italy now”.
I think seeing drastic measures taken in other places makes you more amenable to similar things happening in your own country, state or region. So maybe the “we have to be a positive example” argument from people arguing for drastic climate change prevention in their own small polity does hold some water.
In the previous thread, Bobobob called this a “liability cascade.” I think that’s a very useful meme for explaining the current situation.
I think in this case it’s more of a respectability cascade. Companies and governments generally aren’t doing this out of a fear of getting sued.
I think “liability” means “blame” in this context. Nobody’s going to sue the company/government if they get sick, but they are going to blame them for not doing the things everyone else is doing.
I’m not talking about the reasoning of the people who decided to take these measures, more the psychological reaction from the affected citizens. If you told me last year that I’d be in mandatory home office while politicians are on the radio talking about how the distribution of food is totally secure, no reason to be concerned, I don’t think I would have believed you. Now that’s just how things are.
I’m definitely not arguing that the lockdowns are inappropriate, just that they were unimaginable a few weeks ago.
Hi everyone,
I’m a grad student at [East Coast university] that’s right now going through the process of shutting down and sending everyone home. Since I can easily do all my research from home and my parents are getting up there in years, I’m planning to return home to [West Coast city] with my girlfriend to be close by in case they need my help sometime in the near future.
(There is already a plan in place for us to self-isolate upon getting back to my hometown. I won’t be seeing my parents until at least a few weeks after my return.)
For a variety of reasons we cannot leave until at least next weekend.
I’m trying to decide whether we should fly or rent a car and drive cross-country. We have a pair of P100 masks and ski visors and, if we fly, plan on wearing these on the plane (will these actually protect us? I don’t really know). However, it is hard for me to evaluate the relative risks of flying vs. driving in a situation like this. Any advice would be appreciated.
— Tuesday
I strongly advise driving. Even before you get on the plane, you’ll be stuck in the airport, where lines and crowds are normal (and could conceivably be worse in a week). I would want a hazmat suit for going through an airport right now. The rental car option will have you mostly in the company of your GF, maintaining a significant distance from others at gas stations, etc. It will be really slow, somewhat expensive, and unpleasant, but probably safer from a disease perspective.
I definitely recommend driving, for the reasons theredsheep outlined. My mom recently had to travel from Minneapolis to Boston and I told her to drive (which she did). And she slept in the car to avoid hotels.
I’m glad you stated you’d only wear these masks if flying. Do not wear them (or the goggles) if driving.
If you’ve got disposable gloves, use them when filling up. Otherwise try to have a hand sanitizer of some sort for use after you’ve filled up (and have it ready for use without opening your doors).
I am going to steelman flying.
1. Going cross-country by car means you are potentially dragging viruses along your whole route. You will be eating/sleeping/transacting at lots of points along the path. Can you keep up strict hygiene for a week? (Sleeping in your car one night is reasonable. Sleeping in it cross-country is not.)
2. Flights might be very lightly attended. You can see how many seats are free on the plane when you try to select a seat.
3. Security lines are not necessarily crowded at every airport. Especially since traffic is down. If you arrive early, you can isolate yourself in view of the security line, and then go when lines are short.
(It is a shame we are still standing in line for screening instead of sitting in a big room with a number.)
I respect the steelman, but would you really spend a whole week? With two youngish drivers, and a car rented by the day? Two day would be sort of pushing an e.g. Boston to LA drive, but 3 is eminently reasonable.
With two drivers, 3 days is very easy from LA to Boston. Very little discomfort doing 1000 miles a day.
I think you and @mitv150 are…typical driving? 2 days is literally the least amount of time it could take if you only stop for gas and nothing else (driving in shifts, sleeping in the car while not driving). If you actually want to sleep at night (both of you) 4 is probably the minimum realistic number of days (not necessarily a full 96 hours, but you would arrive on the fourth day for sure.
A comfortable pace (that doesn’t put you constantly in go-go-go mode) probably pushes you to the fifth day.
Hmmm. 43 hours. I did some crazy road trips in my early 20s, getting across areas of the country at seemingly impossible speeds (according to other people) by swapping drivers. But we also had sleep in hotels to supplement naps in the car.
16 hours on day 1 is fine. Maybe 15 on day 2. 13 on day 3. Possibly a few less hours if you speed. (Are the traffic cops more active or less active these days?)
So that’s only 2 nights. Do the first in the car, and the second in a hotel.
You still have food and bathroom stops, each of which has risks. You can carry a good deal of food with you to skip some of those stops. Maybe even most of them if you prepare well enough.
When nature calls, if you only need to pee, use some bushes instead of using public bathrooms.
That certainly doesn’t sound comfortable, and only borders on reasonable (responding as much to the two commenters above as to you).
It is doable, but I wouldn’t do the trip that way unless I absolutely had to.
At my age now I wouldn’t even try it. It’s just asking for trouble.
Maybe we were dumb to do it as college students and we didn’t know what kind of trouble we were asking for. But a young body can pull off a lot if it sees it as an adventure.
(Wait, wasn’t I supposed to be steelmanning taking the plane ride??)
I’d drive and I wouldn’t try to be silly about it. Pack some food and a cooler for the drive, use public restrooms and wash your hands afterwards, hand sanitize when you get into the car after going anywhere.
I’d stay in hotels to sleep, and take reasonable precautions. I think hotels are quite empty right now, and the virus seems to survive about three days on surfaces if not treated. Most likely, your only exposure is to the hotel maid who cleaned your room, as long as you wash your hands after checking in and stay out of any crowds. That’s a pretty low risk, and you get a sink to wash your hands and a microwave to cook something (you can pick something up at the local 7-11 when you get gas) and a bed and shower every night. With two young healthy drivers, you can make good time.
I’d worry a lot more about the airport–lots more exposure, and lots of situations where you don’t have any control over what’s going on–you have to stand in the security line even if there are sick people in it, when you sit down it’s possible there’s someone behind you coughing constantly, the TSA goons are likely to paw both you and your stuff, etc.
@albatross11
I just want to cosign this post by albatross11 (not just the quoted part). Take every precaution, and I would certainly much rather drive than fly, but we aren’t in “Walking Dead, everyone is infected” terrorist. Take reasonable precautions, enjoy your road trip, and you will probably be fine.
I’d expect a hotel to be quite low risk. Go to a good national chain hotel and not some mom-and-pop place. Call ahead and ask to be given a room that hasn’t been used for several days. Hotels are doing miserably badly right now, so there will almost certainly be such a room.
If you’re really paranoid you can prepack all your food in the car, then you don’t ever have to talk to anyone the whole trip except a handful of hotel clerks, and you can talk to them from six feet away. Certainly you will be near to *far* fewer people than you would at the airport.
Rent a van and take your time going cross country. It will be like half your self quarantine, and a ton of fun. Campsites are super cheap too, so it will be safer and cheaper than hotels.
I’m generally with the people who want you to drive, but I want to point out that this epidemic has a history of things suddenly getting worse with little warning. So you might be on your trip, taking good precautions, then something happens or some new evidence comes in, and suddenly all long-distance travel is banned, at least out of wherever you happen to be. Planes in the air are allowed to land, something will be set up to allow long-haul trucking to continue under careful monitoring, but you are required to stay in Podunk now. I’m not predicting this by any means, but keep your eye on the news, because you never know what’s coming next these days.
Robin Hanson is looking pretty smart right now. He saw the need to “flatten the curve” of coronavirus infections over a month ago, well before most of the world had even begun to realize that coronavirus was going to be a big problem outside of China. Now half of twitter consists of “flatten the curve” articles and memes. (Naturally, his solution was “weird,” and thus Hanson’s reward for his insight was a ton of social-media abuse.) I’ll pay even more attention to him in the future.
Who else was right, and not in a stopped-clock sort of way?
Kelsey Piper. She was right both about Corona Virus and about Biden winning the nomination (she predicted it with a 60% chance in January).
Flattening the curve by infecting people purposely still seemslike it’s not worth it imo, mostly because extreme mitigation measures are better and because we don’t know what the disease does long term to those who recover from more serious cases – it looks like organ damage/reduced lung capacity might be a common effect.
If it is permanent, then social distancing is a far superior solution.
(For the record I thought about this idea too and bothered people around me about doing it, but thought it wasnt necessarily worth it, just an option to be kept in mind.)
Can we make social distancing permanent? No more dine-in restaurants, no more theater, no more movie theaters, no more watching sports live?
To be honest I feel like I’ve been training for this “social distancing” thing my whole life. This is like my Olympics now, and it’s time to shine. “Conrad, can you stay in your dark computer room and not talk to anyone for two weeks?!” “Yes…yes I can.”
Honestly, this whole “social distancing” thing is just “normal weekend for me” 🙂
“Don’t go out to any pubs or clubs! No live events! Keep your distance from other people! Best recommendation is to stay indoors in a (well-ventilated) room on your own with no human contact!”
“Okay, and what special measures do you want me to take for the COVID-19?”
You think you are just going to live your introverted life normally, then suddenly church is online only and the supermarket is out of all non-vegan, non-Irish meat.
My son and I did church on YouTube on Sunday.
Is there a way in Skype or Facetime to co-watch a YouTube stream with my parents? They aren’t going to church, either, and I really want to help them socialize. I think it would be a nice thing for us and them to “go to church together” 1000 miles away, so I want a way we can sit/stand/pray/sing in real time with the church service.
If we just both watch the stream independently, one of us is going to get an echo.
@ES-
Applications like Zoom allow you to share a screen with folks in your group. The plan would be for all parties to join the call/group/thingy, then one person to stream the service and share the screen. Everyone can still talk/chat/whatever, and everyone’s watching the same stream. Ideally, this means less lag/desync.
suddenly church is online only and the supermarket is out of all non-vegan, non-Irish meat
(1) There have been Masses televised and broadcast over radio for years now for the sick and elderly who cannot get out to attend Mass in their local church. This has just been extended during this period – the bishop of my diocese has said no public Masses (i.e. the general public not to attend) but the priests will still say Mass and people can follow along on TV/radio and of course, people can make spiritual Communions
(2) Fortunately, I am not a vegan so there is plenty of good Irish carnivore-fodder still on the supermarket shelves! I am baking a ham and roasting a chicken for St Patrick’s Day and will have accompanying vegetables, gravy and so forth 🙂 There has been an increase lately in the number and range of vegan products in the shops, but most people round here still eat creatures with cute faces (just to remind everyone it’s lambing season now, folks, so the fresh lamb chops etc. will soon be in the butchers!)
The Bee has you (err, us) all covered.
imo, “just” is underselling this. It’s a fairly big difference to me to switch from communal gatherings to televised, as nice as the latter is as a stop gap or assistance to those who need it.
Right, and at times like this, when the shelf stockers can’t keep up with demand, you get a good idea of what many people want versus what’s on shelves for niche markets. Grocery near me has plenty of “beyond” products and the seasonal corned beef brisket (which I made for myself on Saturday) but not an ounce of ground beer or chicken on the shelves.
There’s also this:
Churches Switch To Remote Drone Delivery For Communion
> you get a good idea of what many people want versus what’s on shelves for niche markets.
Reminds me of how my local supermarket had a full selection of cherimoyas but not a banana anywhere to be seen.
Ground beer sounds pretty niche to me.
Good Christian drones!
My longstanding policy of “wash your hands every 15 minutes, ignoring the fact that it’s destroying your skin for no very good reason” is making me feel like a hell of a trendsetter right now.
My hands have been drying out from the washing. I know I have rather dry skin, and have an array of lotions and creams, to try, but do you have specific experience with this? Is something besides hand soap better?
@Deiseach
I’m not a Catholic (though this time of year I cosplay as one), so help me understand: aren’t you all supposed to be avoiding such succulent meat dishes during Lent?
Malted barley is ground beer. It needs a little encouragement first, though.
@FLWAB
Abstinence from meat is only a required thing on Ash Wednesday and Fridays during Lent. Any other day you can eat a whole cow if you want.
@Conrad Honcho
I double-dog dare you.
Maybe a very, very tiny cow?
@Conrad Honcho
Aren’t Catholics supposed to not eat meat every Friday of the entire year? I really know much more about medieval than modern practice.
Back in the day, yes. That hasn’t been a rule for a long time. My entire life at least.
It’s not the rule, but it ought to be.
aren’t you all supposed to be avoiding such succulent meat dishes during Lent?
FLWAB, by the old rules yes, but those do not apply during Sundays and feast days that happen in Lent, and the Feast of St Patrick is one such! Technically, in Ireland the feast of St Patrick is a Solemnity, in other countries it’s a Feast Day or an Optional Memorial. It is also (in Ireland) a Holy Day of Obligation, meaning that you are bound to attend/hear Mass on that day just like Sunday. Here’s a link to a Traditional Catholic site (SSPX, very TradCath) which gives a handy rundown of the current versus old rules.
There is also such a thing as the corned beef indult in the USA, I have learned, for those bishops of Irish heritage to give a dispensation to their flocks to eat meat during Lent on that day 🙂
A lot of the old rules on fasting/abstinence got relaxed (though to be fair, there were also a lot of dodges/dispensations from fasting even when the rules were in force) with the Vatican II reforms; the idea of ‘fish on Friday’ being replaced with ‘meaningful penance’. Naturally, this just meant that people gave up being sure to only eat fish on Friday but didn’t take on new penance/prayer obligations 🙂
It’s a bit complicated since; technically the mandatory obligation to abstain was never abolished but it was replaced by exceptions and there was a movement to return to voluntary abstinence, with varying levels of success (once you break a habit, it’s very hard to re-introduce it).
The Western Church for a long time (as in “centuries”) has been nowhere near as rigorous or disciplined about fasting as the Eastern Church, though.
+1
Indeed, I expect that after the dust settles, there will be far fewer restaurants, bars, theaters, etc., around….
Restaurants and bars are small businesses with a high rate of failure. They could spring back up to the same density in 2022.
Theaters are run by publicly-traded corporations and an important part of the bottom line of several megacorps (AT&T, Comcast, Disney on NYSE, Sony in Japan). So far fewer theaters would be interesting times.
Universal is making some of their current theatrical releases available for online rental now so they can still try to make money while people are social distancing. Killing off theaters would probably just accelerate the replacement of traditional theaters with streaming services.
@LMC
Of course you have your AMC/Regal theater types, but there has been a trend of smaller local sort of…boutique(?) theaters popping up that may go by the wayside, at least in my area.
@ Edward
Hand lotion might be better than soap if you buy the creamy “gentle on hands” stuff rather than the see-through blue “murders all bacteria” stuff. Although perhaps that’s just psychosomatic. I generally just try to remember to use moisturiser on the backs of my hands a lot.
If I’m recalling things right he did not simply advocate to “flatten the curve”, but specifically wanted to do it by intentionally infecting the young and healthy in advance. And THAT is what came off as “weird”, I think, not the “flattening” concept in of itself.
The fact that (as far as I know) it remains unclear how long immunity lasts post-infection means that his idea is indeed unreasonable, since it could be a lot of huffing and puffing and suffering with no benefit.
So flattening to the left instead of (or as well as) to the right? Yeah, only Robin Hanson would think of that!
I think the virus is still too recent and unknown to try intentionally infecting people. If it were better established, then yeah – things like “expose healthy young people to it” would be like the ideas of “expose your kids to chickenpox so they get it now and are immunised hereafter”. I’m one of the generation that got measles the old-fashioned way before our national immunisation scheme got under way, but I still think vaccinations are better than “ah sure, let them get measles/mumps, they’ll be grand!”
A few years from now, if there’s a vaccine and vulnerable people have been vaccinated, then sure – let the young’n’healthy get it for herd immunity. Right now? Not a good idea at all.
Don’t worry, I’m not considering whether it’s a good idea, I’m just checking whether I understood it!
Speaking of trying to establish herd immunity, would it send you off on a tirade if I asked you how the border in Ulster is doing?
how the border in Ulster is doing?
That is a very good question. Our fella is acknowledging that this is an all-Ireland, all-island problem.
Now, thing is, stuff we’re doing down here the North is not doing and vice versa. We’ve closed the schools, the North has not, and one woman is taking legal action over that.
At the moment, there is infection in both parts – North and South. There does not seem right now to be cross-border transmission, but who knows how long that will last? I note the USA has added Ireland to the banned list precisely because of the open border between the UK and the North/Republic, though Boris Johnson and the UK government seem to be implementing tougher measures as of now.
Things really are changing from hour to hour. There’s some mild concern but nothing has really happened to start friction between North and South as yet, and hopefully both administrations will start co-ordinating and working together.
EDIT: Though, it would appear, the Brits are at it again. Honestly, between Brexit and this, I am now thinking ST: TNG was dead-on about when Irish re-unification happened 😀
To clarify for any confused persons out there, we do indeed have a public health service. It’s not exactly the same as the NHS, but we do have one!
Binkov’s Battlegrounds is a YouTube channel devoted to analyzing various counterfactual military matchups.
modern US carrier vs Japanese WWII navy
Kirov battlecruiser vs Burke destroyer
a platoon of US Marines vs a Roman legion
I’m not sure how accurate the analysis is, but the host marshals a lot of information and seems to have thought about each matchup carefully.
I’d be particularly interested in hearing what the local military enthusiasts make of his two scenarios pitting Russia against most of the EU and the whole of the EU. Binkov has Russia winning against a divided EU but losing to a united EU.
I’ll have to take a look at those. My prediction on the Final Countdown scenario (yes, I saw what you did there) is the US wins so long as the bombs hold out. The second is probably going to the Kirov, which is bigger and has more weapons. The tech gap there is a lot smaller. On the third, probably the Marines because even Roman discipline is unlikely to hold in the face of completely unknown weapons.
On the EU, that’s going to depend a lot on your assumptions. He might well be right, if we somehow write the US out of the picture.
The first one was pretty decent. I definitely didn’t see any glaring errors, although I would have looked at interactions with the wider war. What impact will this have on the USN in the Atlantic, for instance?
I really liked those videos! Great find! I was surprised exactly how detailed his analysis was, especially compared to other YouTube “what if” types I’ve watched.
For the EU scenarios:
This is mostly just a hardware analysis. Which isn’t nothing (and I found it interesting), but I’ll observe that if you ran this same sort of analysis prior to the WW2 Battle of France, it would probably suggest that the Anglo-French were heavily favored, or at least were at rough parity, depending on the degree to which you weigh their advantage in tanks, artillery, and fortifications over the German advantage in aircraft. Of course, the Germans won largely on the efforts of their Panzers, an area in which they were theoretically badly outclassed.
I think the comparison to the Battle of France is apt if you’re looking at a roughly symmetric state vs. state war, because we haven’t had anything like that for generations, so probably the winner would be the side with tactical/strategic doctrine that’s best adapted to the new technology, and both sides would face some big surprises. That is, if we ignore political factors — which side has a home front best prepared to support the war. But we should probably assume that morale and willingness to fight are rather low, which amplifies the cascading effect of these surprises.
Naval warfare is more hardware-driven; the Final Countdown scenario is basically a turkey shoot, assuming the US carrier group doesn’t burn through supplies (which I know he spent some time addressing). I don’t know that the WW2 IJN would present much more of a threat to a fully-supplied carrier battle group than the Roman Navy.
If I were to add anything to that video, it would be a discussion of subs, including what would happen if the carrier were accompanied by 1-2 nuclear attack subs (answer: even more of a turkey shoot). The IJN’s subs might be the biggest threat, but they spent the vast majority of the time on the surface and would probably be picked off from long distance like everything else (I didn’t hear him say this), before the sonar net even came into play.
Modern carriers are basically big fat targets that allocate a tremendous effort to defense against missiles and submarine-launched torpedoes and yet still have a tendency to fail at this in wargames. My guess is in a real naval war, they would get sunk very quickly and the key fighting would move under the waves. But against a WW2 navy, that defensive effort should stop pretty much anything.
I’d disagree pretty strongly there. You shouldn’t ascribe a single cause, but if you are, I think the best choice is the luftwaffe, which massively demoralized the french forces in the conflict and paved the way for the relatively weak german mechanized forces to advance fast enough to cut off the bulk of the french army before they could react.
They’re big fat targets that move at 30kts, which makes them much harder to destroy than you think. Moving that fast renders them basically immune to any diesel submarine it does’t drive right over except in narrow waters, and makes any nuclear boat trying to approach them much louder than they would like to be. And it dramatically complicates the targeting problem of any long range missile. That is not so say that one should be complacent, but carriers aren’t as vulnerable as you think.
I agree you can’t ascribe German success in France to a single cause, but to say the armor was decisive in the rapid collapse of France doesn’t seem too controversial.
The Luftwaffe was key at Sedan, and the armor was mostly useless in the actual fighting there, but without the prospect of an armored breakthrough, it might have looked like just another local victory as happened periodically in WW1 until enemy reinforcements delayed the advance. And I wonder if perhaps Germany could have still won at Sedan even if the Anglo-French air forces were more evenly matched to the Luftwaffe, by simple virtue of the fact that the Germans were so prepared to concentrate force at that single point (what they called Schwerpunkt).
The overall point, which again shouldn’t be controversial, is that the conquest of France — particularly its ease and speed — was largely a matter of German strategic and tactical doctrine, especially with regards to use of armored forces, and this sort of hardware-based analysis misses how decisive this can be.
As to the point about carriers (also made by bean below), I’ll allow for the possibility that maybe carriers perform exceptionally if there’s ever another real naval war. I wasn’t trying to make a high-confidence assertion about what would happen to them in a real naval war, and I don’t think anyone should have very high confidence here, one way or the other. US naval doctrine clearly recognizes that carriers are targets and is obsessed with their protection. Has that obsession given them enough tools to prevent their sinking in the face of determined enemy efforts, including possible creative wartime ingenuity and a little luck? Hard to say, but it’s at least plausible the answer is “no”.
Realistically, I think if the US loses a carrier or two, it pulls the rest of them back and never puts them at serious risk again, so all it takes is one (un)lucky break to basically prove the point.
Yes, assuming equal morale at the start of the war is a big deal. Defense willingness varies hugely from country to country, and that becomes increasingly important as a conflict drags on.
Another issue Binkov doesn’t really consider is readiness. “100 tanks of type XYZ” could mean 98 tanks ready to go and 2 waiting for parts that have already been orders, or 30 tanks ready to go, 30 that run but aren’t really fit to fight, and 40 that are basically assemblies of spare parts. Although getting access to that sort of information is a really good way to get shot as a spy, which would deter many YouTubers.
I beg to differ on this one.
Can anyone point me in the direction of materialist rebuttals of a particular argument for eliminative materialism about intention? Put somewhat crudely, the argument is (1) configurations of matter cannot by themselves be about anything, (2) brains states are simply configurations of matter, and therefore (3) brains states cannot be about anything. The upshot was that thoughts and beliefs do not exist and even sentences don’t actually mean anything.
What makes the argument plausible is that we don’t count the JFK Profile Rock as a genuine picture of JFK, since no one intended it to look like JFK. Arguably, if a bunch of branches fell off a tree and seemed to form the letters, “JFK,” it wouldn’t be a reference to JFK because no one intended it to be a reference. But if materialism is right (so this argument goes), then people are just clumps of particles, and thus someone thinking about, writing about, or making art of JFK is not actually different from the previous two cases.
Keep in mind that this is a crude reconstruction of an argument I saw years ago. There was an atheist philosopher whose claim to fame was in part for making this argument; I forget his name but remember that he was also known for suggesting that people who find atheism or eliminative materialism depressing (and he included himself) take antidepressants to deal with it. (If anyone else remembers this guy and names him, I’d appreciate it.)
My question is: has there been any robust rebuttals to this argument from a materialist perspective? Pointing out that sentences obviously mean things doesn’t count, because someone could use that while accepting the above argument as a reductio ad absurdem against materialism itself.
EDIT: To clarify further, I’d prefer a rebuttal that shows conclusively where the argument goes wrong, rather than a particular account of how intention works, since those tend to be speculative and controversial and if they don’t work we’re back at square one.
The philosopher you’re describing is Alex Rosenberg, I think.
Yep, that’s him. Thanks!
(1) Is just assuming the conclusion. How does the philosopher show that configurations of matter cannot be about anything? By giving some examples of configurations of matter that aren’t about something? I don’t think that works – I could give many examples of configurations of matter that are not food (toy pizza looks a lot like food but isn’t food, what do you say?) and that wouldn’t prove that no configuration of matter can be food.
Also what about books, paintings, movies, music… Do they also have souls? Or do they have no meaning?
This is a nitpick, but strictly speaking, it isn’t. You could turn the argument into one against materialism by accepting (1) and arguing therefore that thoughts aren’t just configurations of matter.
I chose the JFK Profile Rock because I seem to recall Dawkins once used it as an example of something that looked designed but isn’t. My point is that had a human artist sculpted the rock, we would count it as being about Kennedy, but since no one did, we don’t. Likewise with the branches example.
The eliminative materialist argument, as I understand it, is that the case of the human artist creating something is not significantly different from the case of natural processes creating it, since on the materialist account the artist is simply a bunch of natural processes.
On the non-materialist side, books etc. were at least created by someone who does have a soul, and get their meaning from them. But an eliminative materialist would, if I’m understanding their position correctly, say that they don’t have meaning.
I agree that it is point (1) that is wrong. I would point you towards Douglas Hofstadter’s books for a comprehensive explanation, but here is the short version:
In GEB, Hofstadter begins by explaining the simplest proxy to the problem: formal systems in mathematics. In formal systems, the symbols used don’t mean anything intrinsically, but by choosing the right ‘rules’ for how the symbols can be used, meaning can be ‘forced upon’ the symbols.
His example is a formal system which exist only of the symbols ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘_’, with following rules:
1. Valid words are those that consist of any number of ‘_’, followed by ‘p_q_’, followed by the same number of ‘_’ (axiom rule)
2. From a valid word, a new valid word can be created by changing ‘p’ to ‘p_’ and ‘q’ to ‘q_’
So, now you have a system for creating valid words, like ‘_p_q__’, ‘_p__q___’, etc. Seems pretty meaningless?
Upon closer inspection though, you will notice that this behaves isomorphic to addition of 2 natural numbers (just replace ‘p’ by ‘plus’, ‘q’ by ‘equals’ and any string of ‘_’s by the number of ‘_’s it consists of).
In fact, this system can only express correct additions (there is no way to create eg. ‘_p_q___’: ‘1 plus 1 equals 3’), and it’s possible to express any possible addition between 2 natural numbers in this system.
Due to the isomorphism with addition, the meaningless symbols ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘_’ were automatically imbued with meaning. It doesn’t even matter that any observer would look at this system and doesn’t understand what is happening: the isomorphism with addition is there either way.
This ‘pq-system’ is just a toy-example of course, but something complex such as spoken language behaves in a very similar way: any syllable by itself is meaningless, and while the ‘rules’ of language are way more numerous and complex then those of the pq-system, it’s clear they exist in some (implicit) form.
Why does the sentence ‘this bread is stale’ seems to mean something, while ‘this bread flies yellow’ doesn’t? Each concept in both sentences (‘this bread’, ‘being stale’, ‘flying’ and ‘yellow’) is some sort of axiom (similar to those made by rule 1 of the pq-system).
These axioms can then be modified or strung together by other rules (similar to rule 2 of the pq-system). In the end we end up with a ‘language-system’, which (should) behave isomorphic to reality itself: with each ‘symbol’ corresponding to some object in thingspace (see: Yudkowsky’s sequence on language). And this correspondence is not just a convention, a meaning is ‘forced’ on each symbol by dint of how the rules allows it to behave.
The final step is to carry this line of thinking over to brains, which are just ‘configurations of matter’ as you state. But they are configurations of matter which can take input from the environment, ‘translating’ some external event to signals in the brain, and the way these signals can interact with each other are regulated by exactly how the neurons are connected in the brain.
It’s hard to tell exactly what the equivalent of ‘a symbol’ would be in the brain (a pattern of neural activity, maybe?). Still, similar to a ‘language-system’, there are rules (the morphology of the brain) which dictate how these symbols can interact with each other, creating a system where meaning is ‘forced’ on brain activity, despite the fact that brain is just a configuration of matter.
I agree that it is point (1) that is wrong. I would point you towards Douglas Hofstadter’s books for a comprehensive explanation, but here is the short version:
In GEB, Hofstadter begins by explaining the simplest proxy to the problem: formal systems in mathematics. In formal systems, the symbols used don’t mean anything intrinsically, but by choosing the right ‘rules’ for how the symbols can be used, meaning can be ‘forced upon’ the symbols.
His example is a formal system which exist only of the symbols ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘_’, with following rules:
1. Valid words are those that consist of any number of ‘_’, followed by ‘p_q_’, followed by the same number of ‘_’ (axiom rule)
2. From a valid word, a new valid word can be created by changing ‘p’ to ‘p_’ and ‘q’ to ‘q_’
So, now you have a system for creating valid words, like ‘_p_q__’, ‘_p__q___’, etc. Seems pretty meaningless?
Upon closer inspection though, you will notice that this behaves isomorphic to addition of 2 natural numbers (just replace ‘p’ by ‘plus’, ‘q’ by ‘equals’ and any string of ‘_’s by the number of ‘_’s it consists of).
In fact, this system can only express correct additions (there is no way to create eg. ‘_p_q___’: ‘1 plus 1 equals 3’), and it’s possible to express any possible addition between 2 natural numbers in this system.
Due to the isomorphism with addition, the meaningless symbols ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘_’ were automatically imbued with meaning. It doesn’t even matter that any observer would look at this system and doesn’t understand what is happening: the isomorphism with addition is there either way.
This ‘pq-system’ is just a toy-example of course, but something complex such as spoken language behaves in a very similar way: any syllable by itself is meaningless, and while the ‘rules’ of language are way more numerous and complex then those of the pq-system, it’s clear they exist in some (implicit) form.
Why does the sentence ‘this bread is stale’ seems to mean something, while ‘this bread flies yellow’ doesn’t? Each concept in both sentences (‘this bread’, ‘being stale’, ‘flying’ and ‘yellow’) is some sort of axiom (similar to those made by rule 1 of the pq-system).
These axioms can then be modified or strung together by other rules (similar to rule 2 of the pq-system). In the end we end up with a ‘language-system’, which (should) behave isomorphic to reality itself: with each ‘symbol’ corresponding to some object in thingspace (see: Yudkowsky’s sequence on language). And this correspondence is not just a convention, a meaning is ‘forced’ on each symbol by dint of how the rules allows it to behave.
The final step is to carry this line of thinking over to brains, which are just ‘configurations of matter’ as you state. But they are configurations of matter which can take input from the environment, ‘translating’ some external event to signals in the brain, and the way these signals can interact with each other are regulated by exactly how the neurons are connected in the brain.
It’s hard to tell exactly what the equivalent of ‘a symbol’ would be in the brain (a pattern of neural activity, maybe?). Still, similar to a ‘language-system’, there are rules (the morphology of the brain) which dictate how these symbols can interact with each other, creating a system where meaning is ‘forced’ on brain activity, despite the fact that brain is just a configuration of matter.
I agree that it is point (1) that is wrong. I would point you towards Douglas Hofstadter’s books for a comprehensive explanation, but here is the short version:
In GEB, Hofstadter begins by explaining the simplest proxy to the problem: formal systems in mathematics. In formal systems, the symbols used don’t mean anything intrinsically, but by choosing the right ‘rules’ for how the symbols can be used, meaning can be ‘forced upon’ the symbols.
His example is a formal system which exist only of the symbols ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘_’, with following rules:
1. Valid words are those that consist of any number of ‘_’, followed by ‘p_q_’, followed by the same number of ‘_’ (axiom rule)
2. From a valid word, a new valid word can be created by changing ‘p’ to ‘p_’ and ‘q’ to ‘q_’
So, now you have a system for creating valid words, like ‘_p_q__’, ‘_p__q___’, etc. Seems pretty meaningless?
Upon closer inspection though, you will notice that this behaves isomorphic to addition of 2 natural numbers (just replace ‘p’ by ‘plus’, ‘q’ by ‘equals’ and any string of ‘_’s by the number of ‘_’s it consists of).
In fact, this system can only express correct additions (there is no way to create eg. ‘_p_q___’: ‘1 plus 1 equals 3’), and it’s possible to express any possible addition between 2 natural numbers in this system.
Due to the isomorphism with addition, the meaningless symbols ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘_’ were automatically imbued with meaning. It doesn’t even matter that any observer would look at this system and doesn’t understand what is happening: the isomorphism with addition is there either way.
This ‘pq-system’ is just a toy-example of course, but something complex such as spoken language behaves in a very similar way: any syllable by itself is meaningless, and while the ‘rules’ of language are way more numerous and complex then those of the pq-system, it’s clear they exist in some (implicit) form.
Why does the sentence ‘this bread is stale’ seems to mean something, while ‘this bread flies yellow’ doesn’t? Each concept in both sentences (‘this bread’, ‘being stale’, ‘flying’ and ‘yellow’) is some sort of axiom (similar to those made by rule 1 of the pq-system).
These axioms can then be modified or strung together by other rules (similar to rule 2 of the pq-system). In the end we end up with a ‘language-system’, which (should) behave isomorphic to reality itself: with each ‘symbol’ corresponding to some object in thingspace (see: Yudkowsky’s sequence on language). And this correspondence is not just a convention, a meaning is ‘forced’ on each symbol by dint of how the rules allows it to behave.
The final step is to carry this line of thinking over to brains, which are just ‘configurations of matter’ as you state. But they are configurations of matter which can take input from the environment, ‘translating’ some external event to signals in the brain, and the way these signals can interact with each other are regulated by exactly how the neurons are connected in the brain.
I don’t know exactly what the equivalent of ‘a symbol’ would be in the brain (a pattern of neural activity, maybe?). Still, similar to a ‘language-system’, there are rules (the morphology of the brain) which dictate how these symbols can interact with each other, creating a system where meaning is ‘forced’ on brain activity, despite the fact that brain is just a configuration of matter.
Who decides what the rules are? If your pq-sentences expression addition, they equally well expression quaddition.
The rules can be anything, but most rules result in systems that aren’t isomorphic to anything real, and thus won’t imbue meaning into the symbols. Just like there are presumably uncountable ways to link neurons together in a way that doesn’t produce a functioning brain.
Also, if quaddition is what google seems to indicate, the pq-system does not behave like this, since it cannot form a sentence with 57 or more ‘_’s in the first or second slot and only five ‘_’s in the third.
Interestingly, another interpretation of the pq-system is possible: when you interpret ‘p’ as ‘equals’ and ‘q’ as ‘subtracted from’. The symbols in this system thus have multiple meanings, which is possible since addition and subtraction are related.
The problem is that you’re privileging a particular formal system. You privileged addition, even though it’s obvious the pq-sentences you chose could express quaddition. And closer to the matter (ahem) at hand, you privileged a particular formal system for language. But you could come up with any language-system you like for a given collection of inputs and outputs. The same goes for the brain, modeled as input-output.
@Nick
Just so everyone’s clear, I think what you’re saying is that newcom is presenting the “p_q_” words and the rules for the words as a package deal. But the rules don’t apply themselves; in the absence of someone specifying what the rules are, infinitely many different rules could apply to any given set of “p_q_” words.
So your objection is that the words + the rules are meaningful, but only because someone has intentionally chosen the rules to make it meaningful, which is cheating. Is this correct?
(I know Wittgenstein addressed something like this in Philosophical Investigations, but I admit to not being able to make much sense of that book.)
Oh, I agree that the pq-system is a very specific formal system, designed to illustrate a point. I brought it up to show that it is possible for a system (a lexicographical system such as ‘pq’, or a physical system such as a brain) to ‘be about something’, without:
-Need for the constituent parts of the system to have intrinsic meaning: the symbols ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘_’ had no intrinsic meaning before their use in the system; syllables/words don’t have intrinsic meanings (neither does a single neuron firing).
-Need for meaning to be bestowed upon the system by an agent.
From a realist perspective: there is a reality, with real things in it which behave in very specific ways. It is possible for a system to be isomorphic (to varying extent) to some subset of reality, in which case the system as a whole mirrors that aspect of reality. From there, this ‘mirroring’ streams downwards to symbols constituting the system, ‘forcing’ meaning on them. (Hope that made sense)
To illustrate:
-(Condition: the addition of natural numbers is an abstraction of an aspect of reality, as having 1 countable object and adding 1 countable object will always result in 2 countable objects, etc.)
The pq-system mirrors the properties of the addition of natural numbers: having 3 apples and adding 1 will always result in 4 apples (never 3 or 5), just as ‘___p_q____’ is a valid sentence (and ‘___p_q___’ or ‘___p_q_____’ are not). This will be true for all additions (why the pq-system is isomorphic with addition, and not with quaddition), which forces meaning upon the symbols: ‘_’ behaves in the pq-system like countable objects behave in reality, and this is the case whether or not any agent comprehends it.
-When a basketball players throws a ball to the hoop, in some sense a (non-conscious) part of his brain is (to some extent) isomorphic to the ‘ how objects move’-aspect of reality, as it can send the right signals to the body to result in the ball hitting its target. In this case it’s hard to exactly point at what the ‘symbols’ in the brain are which are involved in this representation (higher level than a single neuron, lower level than all activity in the brain). But with a sufficient level of understanding, it should be possible to explain exactly what the brain was doing, and discover the meaning of the constituent symbols.
Once again, I would really recommend ‘Godel Escher Bach’ by D. Hofstadter, which does this line of thinking way more justice than I can.
@newcom
Sorry, but you are just repeating yourself. I already understood what you were saying, and I’ve read GEB. But every time you say reality is isomorphic, you are assuming there is one particular formal system that gives things meaning. That’s not materialism!
@Nick
Could you specify how such a description falls short of being materialistic?
Just to clarify: the pq-case is just a sanitised example, where the system is fully isomorphic and we fully understand the system which is giving rise to the statements. Do you agree that in that case the system can be said ‘to be about something’, and that the symbols have meaning?
I agree that, when importing this situation to the real world, everything gets more messy: brains and language are only partially related reality, and their full workings (or rules) are not known to us. But I feel like the same line of reasoning that works in the pq-case carries through: it just takes a lot of data and context for someone discern whether meaning is to be found. (eg. The difference between a Chinese sentence and a random sequence of Chinese sounding vocalisations: I might not be able to tell one from the other, but it still remains that only one stems from a system that, however imperfectly and incomplete, relates to reality and thus gives a meaning to that sentence.)
@zqed
Well, you finally got me to read through that whole thing. I hope you’re happy. 😛
I would disagree that Yudkowski doesn’t appeal to a formal system: the formal system he appeals to is arithmetic on the natural numbers.
When Mark takes a pebble out of the bucket and Yudkowski declares the collection of pebbles to now be the pebbles in the bucket plus the pebble in Mark’s hand, he glosses over the fact that he’s changing how he’s counting and thus how he’s applying the formal system. That strikes me as sneaking his own agency in.
Then there’s the issue that David Chapman brings up, which is that what counts as a pebble is itself not a trivial issue: what if one shatters into dust when you drop it in, but you don’t notice?
My point being, and I think Nick’s point being, the rules don’t apply themselves.
Exactly; this is the immaterial real thing Yud is appealing to in an argument for materialism. It’s incoherent.
@Le Maistre Chat: Perhaps EY is not fully a “materialist” (which to be fair does indeed mean “one who believes that nothing exists except matter”), but rather a believer that all physical things are material, or something like that. On the other hand, maybe EY would want to press the point that believing in “one pebble” and “two pebbles” doesn’t mean that you believe in “one” and “two” as independently existing entities. I don’t think the difference really matters here.
@Dacyn
I’m genuinely curious what views would contrast with this. Aren’t “physical” and “material” synonyms in this context?
@Iago the Yerfdog
You have me basically right, yes. About Wittgenstein, check out Kripke’s interpretation of him. That’s where my talk of quaddition comes from. But Kripke makes a different argument than I do; he argues that the rules proposed (say, addition) are susceptible to a higher level interpretation problem, and so on in a vicious regress. That’s a stronger argument, since it’s a problem for the rules approach whether you’re a materialist or not. The reason I started where I did is that your question is how the materialist salvages this.
@Iago the Yerfdog: Apologies for being imprecise: my point is that EY may say things like “thought is matter” without saying things like “numbers are matter”. Is there a name for this?
@Le Maistre Chat:
I feel like you might have redefined ‘materialism’ from “unbelief in fairies and gods” to “unbelief in numbers” at some moment.
“Materialism” has never meant just “unbelief in fairies and gods”. In fact, it’s never even meant that much — there have been philosophies/religions (Stoicism, Manichaeism) which believed in material deities, so you could be both a materialist and a theist if you were so minded.
@Viliam:
Uh, that’s not redefining. Materialism is defined as a type of philosophical monism that believes only matter exists (contra idealism, monism that believes only thought exists). “I Fing love science and math; fairies and gods are delusions” is not and has never been a rigorous definition.
@Mr. X:
What he said.
Right. To be clear, many materialists have defended intentionality arising somehow from matter, as a derivative feature of the world. Not all materialists are eliminativists, after all. But pace my critics in this thread, no one here has yet shown how this avoids determination issues like quaddition.
“Belief in numbers” is actually a very tricky problem for Materialism. What is the relationship between the abstract world of mathematics and the physical world? In what sense is “3” more real than “pink” or “good,” if it is at all? If you’re not careful, it’s pretty easy to recreate Platonism, just as Computationalists recreated animism.
@zqed
Addition and quaddition do not share the same form. They are different operations. For some inputs their outputs coincide; for others they do not.
The point is this. newcom introduced a formal system (your “correspondence of form,” I take it) in order to explain his pq-sentences’ intentionality. But his pq-sentences equally well express quaddition. If you need me to show you how his pq-sentences can be interpreted as quaddition, I will, but let me proceed first. Now, addition and quaddition are different operations. Yet, if newcom wants to say that addition arises out of his pq-sentences, he must admit that quaddition arises out of them, too. And paddition. And raddition, and infinitely more such operations, because there is nothing special about the upper bound we define quaddition with, and we could define as many similar operations as we like. So there are an infinite number of such operations that can be read out of his pq-sentences, and those pq-sentences are about addition in no stronger sense than they are about any of these other operations. And we can come up with much more exotic operations than quaddition. Indeed, no matter how large the collection of inputs and outputs we’re asked to model is, or what sort of inputs and outputs they are, we can come up with as many perverse operations like these as we like.
What I’m getting at is that newcom’s argument has a determination problem. He concludes that meaning has been ‘forced’ on the pq-sentences, and by analogy language and brain states, but his argument has only established that matter “is” about literally anything we would like it to be. newcom’s response to this was to privilege one particular formal system his pq-sentences are about. But per what I’ve said he has no grounds to do so.
It’s only “about sheep” because the shepherd set it up in order to count sheep. IOW, this is just another variant of the robot arm question discussed below.
On this topic, I agree with Nick that your account of aboutness is unable to deal with determination issues, and is therefore useless. Saying “As long as there can be is-about relations between matter, the materialist won’t have to take all of them, she can pick and choose between them using systematic criteria” doesn’t help you here. If you need to appeal to something outside the formal system, bucket of pebbles, or whatever, in order to explain what and how it’s about, then it evidently doesn’t have aboutness in itself.
No it doesn’t. You pointed to the bucket of pebbles as “a configuration of matter that seems to be about something by itself”: pointing out that you need to appeal to the shepherd in order to account for the bucket’s aboutness is sufficient to refute that, regardless of whether or not the shepherd himself is material.
If anything, it’s your materialist response that begs the question: whether or not the shepherd is just a configuration of matter is part of the matter under dispute, so appealing to the materialist position that he is in order to justify materialism is circular reasoning.
If you think the bit about pebbles is a distraction, maybe don’t bring it up in the first place.
I wasn’t making a materialist rebuttal; I was pointing out that your attempted rebuttal doesn’t actually work. “You’re appealing to the intentions of the shepherd to explain the aboutness of the stones, therefore the stones don’t have aboutness in themselves and don’t form a valid example of ‘a configuration of matter that seems to be about something by itself'” doesn’t require taking any particular position on whether or not the shepherd himself is just a configuration of matter, a Berkeley-esque immaterial object, or anything in between.
ETA:
Since most of the discussion so far has centred on whether eliminative materialism inevitably follows from materialism, it follows that materialism is in fact on trial here.
True. But I’d also add that I don’t have to be trying to refute materialism here to try to refute newcom’s answer. I think zqed has been reading things into newcom’s view that aren’t there and substituting (accidentally, I am sure, on account of trying to take the conversation closer to Iago’s top level question) a hypothetical stronger form of materialism, which is not what I was arguing against.
To say that one thing is “about” another is to say that they are related in some important or relevant way. But the notion of importance (or relevance) is subjective, which is to say, “we” decide what the rules are, and it’s OK for us to do that. PQ-sentences only “equally well” express quaddition if them doing so equally serves our purposes, which is far from clear here.
Who are “we”? Consciousnesses that are an epiphenomenon of meat, per computationism? Then there’s no reason to exclude other matter with epiphemonenal consciousness from the set “we” (see Jaskologist below).
“it’s OK for us to do that” is incoherent without a consistent definition of “us”.
@Le Maistre Chat: “We” = “denizens of SSC”. (Or at least that’s how I meant it, no claims about others in this conversation.)
ETA: Or what might (or might not) have more relevance to your point: There’s only no “reason” if you refuse to consider what is important to us [1] as part of what constitutes a reason. Once you do so, it’s clear that the existence of an arbitrary correspondence does not constitute a good reason for saying that rocks think.
[1] Again, here I mean people part of the (currently SSC) conversation,
@Dacyn
You’re aiming to solve the lack of intentionality by appealing to minds. The problem, as Iago said from the beginning, is that eliminativists have been arguing there is no intentionality in minds, either, by analogy with other matter. That was the problem he wanted materialists here to solve. You can’t solve it by presupposing we, i.e., configurations of matter, have purposes.
ETA:
This is a brand of solipsism with which I am unfamiliar. 😉
@Nick: Ah, thanks. Yeah, you would have a harder time of it if you want to get rid of all intentional language (rather than just explaining it in terms of other language), since that would require getting rid of all language that requires interpretation. I guess I am not an eliminative materialist then 🙂
Hmm. I have to admit I kind of like this answer. But I see a couple of issues:
First, it seems like it might prove too much. The JFK Profile Rock is isomorphic (at a low resolution) to (part of) JFK’s face. Does that mean it really is an image of JFK, despite not having a sculptor?
Second, whether or not language is isomorphic to reality is a very contentious issue. It’s been a while since I looked into it, but I remember finding the anti-representationalists’ arguments more convincing at the time.
Given the locus of meaning is within individuals who are interpreting things (as is the locus of all value judgements whatsoever), and not on the creator*, this argument you are referring to seems on its face absurd.
* – in English classes isn’t literary analysis generally described as “what did the author intend”, not “what is the actual meaning of this work”?
That doesn’t solve anything. Where are these ‘interpretations’, if not in brain states? What are these brain states, if not configurations of matter?
Here’s how it “solves” it:
Of course they aren’t. It takes another configuration of matter called a living being to assert within the self of that being that the other configuration of matter is about something.
You need a tautology former. Tautology formers aren’t about anything, but within themselves a tautology can be formed about some other object that makes that places that other object within a value relationship in which the other object is about something.
So basically an abstraction is necessary. How can you make a materialistic abstraction? I don’t know if you can. But at least I’m pointing out the fundamental limits of this kind of materialism. (If I am. I am not the kind of philosopher that definitionally learns what categories of philosophy are about, so ?)
The argument is that there is nothing special about a living being that makes their brain states capable of being about something else.
Put another way, you’re saying that meanings are all in the mind, but the argument is that there are no such things as minds on a genuinely materialist conception of the universe.
+1
Yes.
I don’t see why people think this is a materialistic slam-dunk instead of someone pointing to a literal explanatory hole in materialism.
Incompleteness theorem, anyone?
Cogito, ergo sum, man. I do have the ability to attribute meaning, ergo my configuration of matter has the ability to attribute meaning, ergo, while postulate A may be correct that there is no “aboutness” to my configuration, but it says nothing about my configuration’s ability to postulate “aboutness” on other things.
That is not what postulate A is saying at all. It is merely saying that the configuration of matter resulting in a mind is “cannot by themselves be about anything,” (I’d argue more strongly that such configuration cannot, even in the context of other things, be about anything, period.)
However, this “brains states cannot be about anything.”, does not follow, as the meaning of “be about anything” seems to change from postulate A through postulates B and C. “Be about anything” is distinct from “have about anything”. Postulate A is “be about anything”, while postulate C is “have about (contain) anything”.
This also literally ignores the existence of emergent properties, which we know exist (easily demonstrable by igniting a flame).
If it hasn’t been pointed out above, I want to point out one more absurdity of this argument before leaving this open thread to do others things:
The argument ignores time (it’s literally talking about configurations of matter, not changing configurations of matter). It can easily be argued materialistically that while a frozen moment of course has no “aboutness” to it, the moment you have these configurations of matter change, then you add context, you add causality, and causality itself as a materialistic concept imposes “aboutness” to changing matter configurations.
I’ve seen it stated elsewhere that consciousness may arise through feedback loops in the brain. Which would be another example of the need for change-through-time for any “aboutness” to exist.
Stop getting hooked up in semantics. The universe is moving models, not moving words.
The materialist position reduces to panpsychism as its logical conclusion. You may either bite that bullet or reject materialism in response, but I don’t think it’s avoidable as a conclusion.
Scott Aaronson describes this in the section Computationalism and Waterfalls, although I think he dismisses it a bit too patly.
I’m not aware of any Computationalists who have properly grappled with the fact that the very ground under your feet is performing infinitely complex calculations if only you choose the right ruleset. Do you know of any?
A good primer is the two papers Feser wrote: “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” and “From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature.”
I remember first hearing that Feser wrote about this and figuring it would be very silly. But I read Feser’s papers, and went back and read Ross’s, too, and I was converted. (I don’t think that’s a story I’ve told here before.) Anyway, I’ve defended parts of the argument repeatedly here at SSC, and I’ll probably be able to dive into the weeds again this week if folks are so inclined.
I would be so inclined!
But expect me to come at you.
Yes, here’s where we left off. You can start over if you like.
Haha! You have… really kept track of this discussion. How should we resume?
Sure, I guess I’ll start off. So in your last reply, I would reiterate that I believe this part is wrong:
Maybe I’m just getting hung up on this example (since it seems to me we can do both), but there’s no material difference between the brain’s adding and the brain’s quadding, so there’s no way to get into this state; that’s what it means that matter isn’t determinative. So we need to posit an immaterial intellect whose formal causation is responsible for determining whether the material operations in the brain are adding and not quadding.
(This is the reason, I take it, for Aristotle’s seemingly bizarre suggestion that the intellect is a kind of thing that can “take on” the forms of other things. Normal formal causation is responsible for a basketball being round or my desk being wood-textured; the intellect is responsible for its matter, presumably some part of the brain, being additive and not quadditive.)
You say that there is no material difference between addition and quaddition.
Presumably, you would also say that there is no material difference between pure form and incompossible form.
I’m not sure what you mean by either pure form or incompossible form.
You say that there is no material difference between addition and quaddition.
What do you mean by that.
I mean no number of facts about matter will tell you which of the two I have done. If you take a look at pp. 13–14 of Feser’s first paper he walks the reader through Ross’s argument.
Stated more generally : syntax cannot be determined simply by looking at input and output.
Is that fair?
Reading through the first paper you linked, I think Feser actually rebuts the argument, but at the cost of giving up a mechanistic sort of materialism. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, myself, but I wonder if it’s acceptable to most materialists.
Hmm. I always thought panpsychism was simply universalized property dualism: that everything has mental characteristics. I gather you mean by it a much stronger idea: that basically everything counts as a mind. A kind of materialist animism.
I’m not sure what to make of Aaronson’s response to the waterfall argument. On the one hand, he’s obviously right that for any algorithm you might impute to a waterfall, the heavy lifting is being done by the translation instead of the waterfall itself. On the other hand, he doesn’t elaborate on the significance of this or go into how this differentiates the waterfall from a brain.
It’s both weaker and stronger than that. One of the questions commonly posed to Materialism is “where does consciousness come from?” because the one thing I have direct experience of is myself, sitting inside this handsome sack of mostly water. So what’s the thing sitting inside there that comprises “myself”?
The common answer is something along the lines of Computationalism, wherein consciousness “arises” out of an information processing system (like our brains), presumably after it passes some sort of complexity threshold.
Everything above this paragraph is an assumption. The stuff below is not, it’s just applying what we know about computation to draw out some weird implications of those assumptions.
The thing about “computation” is that it can be done by anything. We’re familiar with using electricity to do computation, but it is possible to build to a computer out of nearly anything in the world. You can implement one yourself using a pencil and note cards. You can build one out of water. You can build one out of the movements of live crabs. And within any of those systems, you could run Minecraft, then implement Conway’s Game of Life inside of that, then implement a computer inside of that and run the same computation in there.
The possibilities are literally infinite. We just use electricity because it’s fast. With me so far?
If it’s the computations in your brain that makes it conscious, we could replicate your consciousness by running those same computations in a computer program (most Asp-Rats think this is obviously true). But we could also replicate it on the crab-puter, or a water-puter simulated inside the crab-puter. And once we’ve made that jump, why are we leaving out the infinite other rule sets which implement your consciousness in the world around you? The movements of air particles in the wind have a computation that is Turing-equivalent to your brain, if we just find the right ruleset.
We can map any arrangement of matter to any computation. Those computations are happening even if we don’t harvest the results. So your mind is already being simulated in an infinite number of ways. And everything you do kills an infinite number of copies of yourself, but also spawns an infinite number of new ones.
Or maybe materialism isn’t true after all.
That’s really interesting. I’ve always rejected the idea of conscious persons made out of Magic: The Gathering cards or lambda calculus, but the idea that any sufficiently-complex system would implement every possible person is… bizarre.
Clearly, computationalism’s assumption of subtrate independence is flawed. As I read him, even Aaronson admits that, but he thinks it can be mostly-salvaged by adding additional stipulations like participation in the arrow of time.
But I think your conclusion that the only way out is to reject materialism is a little too hasty. Computiationalism is only one form of materialism, after all. On the other hand, if the eliminative materialists are right and materialism implies eliminative materialism, I’d count that as a strong reason to reject it.
You’re right. Jumping to rejecting materialism when the claims involved are materialism+computationalism is fallacious.
@Jaskologist
For what it’s worth, I’m not a materialist either. My suspicion is simply that the particular argument I initially posted about is wrong, both as an argument for eliminative materialism and as an argument against materialism.
So, I want to make the same argument as I made above: saying that a certain thing is a thought pattern is ascribing some significance to it, which is a subjective notion, so it’s not surprising that we think some things are thought patterns and don’t think other things are thought patterns. Is there any particular reason the argument doesn’t work here?
So are you saying that the things that we do think are thoughts really aren’t, or that the things we don’t think are thoughts really are, or that there’s no fact of the matter whether they are or aren’t?
In the first case, if thoughts don’t exist how is it that we think they do? If the second, this seems like it collapses into the sort of materialist animism Jaskologist and I were talking about. If the third… I’m honestly not sure how that would work.
I feel like I’ve misunderstood you.
There’s only a fact of the matter whether they are or not once you sufficiently specify what you mean by “thoughts”. This is clear by an appeal to edge cases, but in many realistic cases we can appeal to common sense to get us started [1]. There’s no reason common sense has to respect rules like “treat an arbitrary correspondence between a rock and the world in the same way it treats correspondences between our brains and the world”, so it’s perfectly possible for it to define one as a thought and the other as not a thought. But common sense is actually playing a role in defining the notion of thought here, not just in interpreting it.
[1] The fact that common sense can get us far can mislead us into thinking that there was a fact of the matter before we started.
Not if you can distinguish a pattern from a process.
This seems more like a confusion than an argument. The book “Lord of Rights” cannot be about hobbits? (Or is this an argument for books having souls? Checkmate, materialist!)
I suppose the argument is rather something like: regardless of the information encoded somewhere, unless there is someone there to actually use it, it is useless. Which I kinda agree with, but before we proceed, please notice how we are moving from “cannot be about” to “cannot be usefully about”.
So, let’s try to see information in action. Suppose we have a factory robot that operates in the following way: There is a conveyor with some objects, for example apples. There is a camera that checks each apple, and if the apple is damaged somehow, the camera sends a signal to a mechanical arm, which removes the apple from the conveyor. Would it be okay to say that the signal from the camera to the arm is about the apple? I mean, the signal is generated depending on the properties of the apple, and the consequence of the signal is that something happens to the apple. Is this what “about” means?
The obvious counter-argument is that the mechanical arm does not understand the signal. It has no concept of “damaged apple”, or even “apple”. We could move the same arm to a different machine, which would use the same signal to separate green cubes from blue cubes, and the arm would function exactly the same. Therefore, at least for the arm, there is no “about apple”. — Well, okay. But the system as originally proposed is still suspiciously efficient at removing damaged apples based on the signal, considering that the signal is “not really about apples”, isn’t it?
So let’s move the goalpost again, and say that “about” requires the recipient having a mental model of the encoded thing. Only if you have a concept of an apple, and you get an information about apples, and you recognize that the information is about those things that you know as apples… only then the information was truly “about” apples.
But now the debate turns into circular reasoning, I am afraid. When I say “well, if you insist on configurations-of-matter that construct mental models of things, humans are an example”, you could say “stop right there; you are assuming that humans are only made of matter, but that is the exactly the thing I am arguing against”, and you would have a point. But I could make exactly the same point “you are trying to prove that humans are not only made of matter, by assuming that configurations-of-matter cannot have mental models… in other words, you are assuming the thing you are trying to prove”.
If I were a philosopher, I could suggest that we need to define “about” precisely, before we proceed, because unclear definitions lead to unclear debates. But as a person who dislikes philosophy, I would suspect that this would only lead to more clever verbal arguments, i.e. more bullshit.
Instead, we should examine how “about” works in the real world: to study specific examples of… robots, viruses, plants, animals, humans. How they process information; how they store it. Hopefully, there we could find how “about” is gradually constructed from not-about. Not in a philosophical sense, but in the this-is-how-it-actually-works sense.
That is what the argument implies, as I understand it. Remember this is an argument made by an eliminative materialist against non-eliminative materialists. It’s a modus ponens argument; the anti-materialist argument is the modus tollens version. I’m looking for a good rebuttal to both.
One thing to note about the examples of the repurposed apple-counting machine is that someone set up the machine to count apples, and then someone (else?) set it up to count cubes. In each case, the “aboutness” of the signal is only obviously present because someone put it there.
(Related: Donald Davidson’s response to the Chinese Room Argument that the thing that knows Chinese is whoever wrote the book/algorithm.)
If eliminative materialists are right, then the machine’s signals are not about anything, because the actions of the human-shaped clumps of matter that set them up are not about anything either.
Yes, but that’s just because I said “robots” to avoid the argument “but X has an immaterial soul”. If the robots evolved… or if they are bacteria instead of robots… the argument stays the same. (Do bacteria have souls?)
Well, as you say in your original comment, that’s the question, isn’t it?
To repurpose a creationist thought experiment, imagine a tornado blew through a pile of scrap and assembled the machine. Furthermore, a second tornado causes a bunch of apples to fall onto the machine’s conveyor belt and it starts up.
Should we count its signals as being about apples then? I honestly don’t know.
EDIT Thinking about it more, I think this might be a genuine counter-example to the first premise of the argument.
I assume you mean “The Lord of the Rings”, not “The Lord of Rights”. Regardless, though, the reason books have meaning is that it’s imparted by conscious agents — in this case, presumably, the author. If you had a universe with no conscious agents whatsoever, in which a load of atoms just so happened to get arranged into an object identical to the copy of “The Lord of the Rings” currently sitting on my shelf, that object wouldn’t be about hobbits, or anything else, really.
Again, because a conscious agent or agents — the engineer, the workers in the factory making robot arms, etc. — designed the arm in order to perform this task. IOW, the robot arm’s “aboutness” is derivative of that of conscious agents, not inherent to the arm itself.
It’s teleological?
To put on my Ed Feser hat for a second, it’s specifically an artificial teleology, instead of a natural teleology.
Is artificial teleology problematic to anyone other than eliminative materialists?
It’s a good look on you. Wear it more often. 😉
Yep.
Same as the previous comment, imagine that I said “bacterium” instead of “robot”.
Your bullshit detector is ringing because the argument invalidates itself :
All you need to understand is 1. the mind is utterly dependent upon configurations of matter, and 2. the world is normal and thus materialism sums to normality. Then you can beat a tortoise in a footrace.
As others have said, the flaw is in (1).
Configurations of matter can be “about” something, but for this to be the case, there has to be some causal connection to the configuration of matter from the thing that it’s about.
For example, there is a causal chain from the real likeness of JFK to paintings made of him, even those painted long after his death:
1. Pictures are taken of JFK (Real likeness –> image in photograph)
2. An artist looks at photographs of JFK (Images in photographs –> ‘image’ in artist’s mind)
3. The artist paints their picture of JFK (Mental image –> painted image)
There is no such causal chain for the JFK Profile Rock, so as you say the rock is not really a genuine picture of JFK, even if it coincidentally happens to vaguely resemble him (in a way that’s greatly assisted by our brains’ overactive face detectors).
I don’t think that will do the trick. It won’t for instance let you distinguish between being triangular and being trilateral, which have all the same causal connections but mean different things. If you tried to determine which one the configuration was about, there would be no fact of the matter which one it was.
(This point is raised in the course of Feser’s article on Ross’s argument and immaterial aspects of thought.)
Also, the causal-connection view runs into problems when something is about fictional characters or objects. “The Lord of the Rings” is about hobbits (amongst other things), but since hobbits don’t actually exist, there can’t be a causal chain between a hobbit and a copy of LOTR.
Again, there are cases where there’s a clear causal connection, but where we wouldn’t say that there was any aboutness involved. E.g., if I’m going for a walk and leave a footprint in a patch of mud, there’s a clear causal connection between the configuration of matter that is my shoe and the footprint in the mud, but it’s hard to see how the footprint is “about” my shoe.
IOW, having a causal connection is neither necessary nor sufficient for aboutness.
I believe it’s necessary but not sufficient. So I don’t need to address your footprint example (I agree the presence of some causal chain alone is not sufficient) but ought to address the question of hobbits.
As you say, hobbits do not exist in reality; they are a fictional construction from the imagination of one J.R.R. Tolkien. So how can there possibly be a causal chain to anything meaningful?
Well, how do imaginary things come about in our imaginations? I’m inclined to agree with Kirby Ferguson that everything is a remix. We imagine things by combining both concepts from the real world, and the fictional constructions of others, in new and interesting ways. I’d say hobbits in particular combine the idea of a “relative” race of Man (perhaps inspired by the notion of subspecies of animals) with the concepts of being very short, walking barefoot, living in holes, and being hospitable. All of these individual ideas clearly have links to the real world; Tolkien simply combined them into a composite and called them Hobbits.
So anyone who speaks of Hobbits today must have some causal connection to Tolkien’s imagination, and Tolkien had connections to the real world (or to other stories whose attributes in turn link somehow to reality) for each of the attributes of the halflings he imagined. If this wasn’t the case, how could he have written sensibly about them in a way that millions of readers understand?
I think a similar process is going on when I imagine, say, a “regular 23-gon.” I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen one, but I can conceptualize it by combining the concepts of “regular polygon” and “23”. (Also possibly “circle”, since that’s what higher-order regular polygons start to look like.)
I’d be interest to hear what you think needs to be added to make it sufficient. I’m having trouble thinking of any possible extra ingredient which doesn’t somehow smuggle in intentionality from elsewhere, but that might just be a lack of imagination on my part.
I agree with all this, but I’m not sure it helps you to refute “(1) configurations of matter cannot by themselves be about anything”. If the LOTR-shaped configuration of matter currently sitting on my shelf is “by itself” about hobbits, then it should be possible to explain its aboutness without having recourse to any third object, like JRR Tolkien or his mental activities. Nobody doubts that configurations of matter can be about something, just that they can be about something without getting that aboutness from some external source.
Initially, I didn’t understand how this was at all a counterargument to my point. But after skimming through the paper and thinking about it, I think I get what you’re saying. So allow me to restate your argument, and let me know if I’m misunderstanding you and Feser:
1. We define a “triangle” as a polygon with three angles, and a “trilateral” as a polygon with three sides.
2. Due to the laws of geometry and to basic common sense about how sides form angles, every polygon has three sides has three angles and vice versa; i.e. the set of triangles must be exactly equal to the set of trilaterals.
3. Every triangle has the exact same properties and thus causal connections to our brain as a trilateral, since every triangle is a trilateral.
4. Yet we have different definitions, and perhaps separate concepts* for the two in our minds. If I really twist my brain around, I can imagine a situation that would convince me the two sets of polygons were not equal.
5. Therefore there must be different “symbols” in our minds that represent triangularity and trilaterality.
6. But from whence do those different symbols arise, when the causal connections from external reality must be identical for the two?
7. Thus, meaning cannot be determined solely by causal connection, when two concepts have distinct meanings in the mind but the same causal connections to reality.
My boring, evasive response to this dilemma is that, contrary to point 4, I don’t think of triangularity as distinct from trilaterality (see my footnote below) and virtually never even use the latter term at all. For the equivalent problem of quadrangle vs. quadrilateral, I use the two terms completely interchangeably, with a slight preference for “quadrangle” regardless of the situation because it’s more fun to say.
But that’s dodging the question. Assume, for sake of argument, that I did have separate concepts for triangles and trilaterals. (I’m sure that there’s some real-life example in which I have two concepts for the same thing, but I’ll stick with the geometric example because it’s simple.) How could this come about, in terms of causal links? Well, when determining the triangularity of a polygon, the chain goes something like:
Look at shape –> count angles –> get three –> categorize as triangle
whereas for determining trilaterality, it goes:
Look at shape –> count sides –> get three –> categorize as trilateral
These two processes will yield the same result for any polygon. So, I would say that thinking of triangles and trilaterals as separate categories is a bucket error (in the reverse direction from what Anna talks about in that article: having two separate ‘buckets’ that should be merged into one). The possibility for a bucket error arises from having two distinct processes or causal chains that lead from the same place, to the same place.
But I think that it still might make sense to have separate concepts of triangularity and trilaterality, since the causal processes for determining those two attributes are distinct. They do imply each other, but only through additional geometric reasoning. To spell out a possible chain of such observation and reasoning: “I counted the number of sides on this polygon, and there were three, so I know it is trilateral. Since any polygon has the same number of sides and angles–because they alternate cyclically–I know that if I were to count the number of angles, I would find three. Thus this shape must also be triangular.” Of course, after proving the geometric reasoning in the general case (or, as most do, implicitly understanding it without needing to formally prove it), I freely go straight between triangular and trilateral without repeating the intervening reasoning each time.
Here’s some flowcharts I made of the the “confused” and “resolved” causal chains.
Hope I’m not entirely missing your point!
*I think the “triangle/trilateral” example is subideal, since I don’t really have separate concepts for the two. I pretty much only ever think of “trilaterals” in the course of proving that it’s an equivalent definition to “triangle”. In fact, I’m almost certain that as a child I learned that a triangle was “a shape with three sides”, and further have never even heard the word “trilateral” outside of this discussion. Perhaps “quadrangle” vs. “quadrilateral” would be a better example, since I have at least heard both of the terms used.
I was also very impressed by this book, which was also an easy and enjoyable (as much as it can be, given the subject matter) read. I agreed with almost all of it, and I think “decadence” is a useful concept and an accurate assessment. It’s not a matter of institutional failure or late capitalism–those are pieces of it. It is the ability and desire to sustain widespread let’s-pretendism. Been reading a lot of somewhat similar books lately, and one suggestion that was unique to it, though a very minor point toward the end, was that Americans seem to be trending really hard into various New Age stuff.
I would not lump Emerson, Nietzsche, and Jung with self-help magical crystal stuff (he sort of does this, saying they are different strains of pagan thought–there are similarities, and their ideas can be repackaged into anything, but I consider it crucial that the former emphasizes an unsettling awareness and autonomy that the latter IMO actively discourages). But I do think it is part of the same trend, in that it is filling the void of traditional religion, in response to a spiritual need that is natural in most people.
I am noticing a resurgence in both, and a resurgence of the former is interesting to me, and I don’t think as far from traditional Christianity as he thinks, and probably has more potential to influence society. The latter has been more dominant but is also accelerating. In recent years several people I know who thought of themselves as proudly science/fact-based, utterly non-spiritual people seemingly went overnight into believing a few “magical” things. Some of it is as simple as suddenly claiming lemons or vitamins have universal (or oddly specific) healing properties after reading something online, as though this could have just been discovered, and with zero curiosity as to the mechanism of this. They blend this with their science talk in an uncritical way, saying something about inflammation or whatever. But these people tend to check out of larger of social projects–it’s an escapist, consumer-culture impulse.
Online tabletop roleplayers of SSC!
A friend of mine is looking into running the rest of his currently in-person TTRPG online. What services do people recommend for doing this?
The system is a Powered By The Apocalypse game set at a professional wrestling show. This means there’s no need for a tactical map, and the only dice rolls it needs to be able to handle are 2d6+X. However, it does need to be able to do voice chat.
How many people? In my experience, running an online game with voice chat is about as stressful as running in person for a 50% larger group.
Discord is probably the best free option, and is what I recommend they try first (assuming they want audio only). If that fails, TeamSpeak is still around and you can get a server for pretty cheap (~$5 per month for a small one).
If they want video, Zoom is the best software I’ve used for video conferencing by a considerable margin. Webex is ok but not great. I strongly recommend you avoid Skype.
(This assumes they trust their players to make and report die rolls)
Five players in addition to the DM, but being a wrestling show means that most of the “encounters” are one-on-one matches. Something fancy like a tag team match could happen, but it would be very rare for a fight to involve all of the players.
Discord with one of the many dice roller bots will probably be good enough. Otherwise, Discord for chat + Roll 20 for images/maps/rolls is what I generally use.
I’m in a longstanding half-online game (four of us in-person, plus another two across the country). We just open a video call in Discord or Facebook Messenger, and the DM uploads photos of notes in the text channel.
I was in one other all-online game which we did all through Discord; Avrae bot worked well enough for us there.
I have used a combination of Discord and Roll20 for years. Roll20 is great for shared visuals: it can do grids and hexes, or just imported images files for flavor. It has a good system for making player and npc tokens and tracking statistics like health, and it lets you easily make multiple boards you can switch to throughout the game. Plus they have tools for character sheets and fog of war and a lot of other things a GM may find useful. And it’s free (you can pay for better stuff, but I’ve never found it necessary). It has a built in voice chat system but I never use it. Discord is definitely the most stable VC I’ve used for large groups.
Not sure if this is too much culture war, but Trump has done the impossible. He’s reversed the polarity of a partisan issue. Usually the right wing are more fearful of new infectious diseases and more in favor of aggressive action, while the left wing prefer a more measured response. See Scott’s previous piece. But now we have the opposite.
Reversing the polarity happens all the time. Back in 2016, Trump changed wariness of Russia from a rightwing or neutral position to a left wing position. Likewise, free trade used to be a Republican position.
There’s also a lot of stuff like views on budget deficits or executive overreach that seemingly depend solely on who is in office to begin with.
Free Trade is a weird one, that had pretty bi-partisan support, at least among the party establishments. Bill Clinton signed onto NAFTA before the Republicans took over Congress, and Rush Limbaugh supported this move.
Bill Clinton was pretty much the first major figure “on the left” that supported free trade. In the decades before him the Democrats were largely protectionists. Michael Dukakis, who was the Democratic presidential candidate before Clinton, was very Trumpian in his trade stance.
I’ve read several people over the last few years who have pointed out that what counts as “left” and “right” are being redefined, as they have been many times before. For example, a century or so ago, protecting the environment from rampant industrialism used to be a right-wing issue, and I’m told that opposition to homosexuality used to be a left-wing issue.
The left used to be against immigration because lower wages/fewer jobs for labor. The right was for it because cheap labor for capital, and the establishment right still is.
@Conrad Honcho says:
To personalize it even more, in 2015 Senator Sanders explicitly said he was against “open borders”, but in 2019 he said he wanted to “decriminalize border crossings”.
Seemed a big flip in just a few years.
That’s not so much a shift in policy as a shift in rhetoric. That crossing the border improperly is a criminal offence makes almost no difference to immigration policy. They still have to catch you before they can prosecute you; conversely, they can still deport you either way.
I don’t think its so confusing. The right wingers are the ones who drove the anti-Corona intellectual movement in the US in the early times. Apparently a visit from Tucker Carlson was a major driver in convincing Trump to take it much more seriously. They were the ones defending the Travel bans, etc.
Its only in the era of the corona freakout (strarting around March 1 or very late Feb) that certain parts of the right have started talking about the reaction as an overreaction. I don’t agree with that segment, but it is coherent, because the left was either not talking about corona or actively downplaying it until this shift happened. No one has demonstrated other people had all these awesome ideas in January and February (unless you go into the right wing nationalist zone of punditry), so what is the point?
At least one left-wing blogger I know of has been strongly warning about the coronavirus since January.
For sure there are some, but people like her never really broke onto CNN. Also, I would note Jan 30 is kinda late to have a first post. That is basically when the China travel ban went into effect.
This is pretty much right. The right-wing has been at a 4-5 on “we need to do more” since January, with the ultra-right at a 7-8 (mostly because to them “do more” means “close the borders”, which they want anyway)
Now everyone has stampeded to a 9 and the right hasn’t moved, so we’re the ones who are getting yelled at for not taking it seriously.
It could be that 5 is too low and we need to be more at the 7-8 range. I’ll remember to listen to the ultras more often in the future.
Have we actually closed the borders?
It’s unclear to me. But it does seem clear that in some jurisdictions, the police are forcibly enforcing bar closures (with no due process), individual quarantines, and forcibly confiscating the legitimately purchased property of individuals because they were deemed to have probably totally been about to price gouge…
Some of them, yes. Interestingly, Mexico is considering closing their northern border to prevent the spread.
Most modern libertarians don’t realize how strong America’s quarantine laws are because they haven’t been strongly used for a generation or two.
But remember, this is a country that lived through LOTS of serious disease waves, from polio to measles to various flus, etc. Once health emergencies are declared, the government has a huge amount of power that they don’t have otherwise.
I think, if we’re being honest, pandemic containment is one of the rare cases where having a strong government temporarily suspending freedoms is something everyone can appreciate in the long run. You don’t have time for due process when someone might be carrying a virus than can kill people. Obviously, there is an expiration date on such powers, but judicial usage of extreme power is why we form states in the first place.
It might depend on your sources. All of my right wing contacts have been at defcon one for a month over the coronavirus, but I work in the healthcare industry, so we’ve been across the board more aggressive. Not to mention, my right wing sources were very critical about how the FDA restricted coronavirus testing, even more so than my left wing sources which put more blame on Trump and CDC funding. Which of these is the bigger problem is up to interpretation, but I’m general, the right wing is still pretty aggressive on this.
I knew some uiltra-right people who were “get your n95 masks now” two months ago.
I’m an experienced software engineering manager with rustyish-but-viable coding skills still, recently between jobs, and available (via remote work, natch) to do volunteer engineering, project management, team coordination/coaching etc if there are COVID-19-fighting efforts that could use such things:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6645055696998146048/
I have no idea whether this will actually lead to anything useful, but it seems worth a shot.
I have nothing to add to this, but it does seem like it might be a good time for another classified thread.
FWIW this has already resulted in a plausible outreach-nibble, so thanks once again to SSC readers for being such an awesomely multitalented and multi-interested group.
The Blackberry Curve I’ve had since 2011, although perfect in all other ways, no longer meets the “reliable” part of point #4 (below), and so I’d like to replace it with a device that has all four of these characteristics:
1. Comes loaded with, or can easily be loaded with, some kind of local/non-cloud-based word processing software that can output *.doc or *.pages files
2. Has a physical keyboard
3. Not larger than 22cm x 11cm and not more than 1cm thick (when folded, if it folds)
4. Will, for at least another 3-5 years, likely be reliable and easy to find parts/batteries for
…As many of these characteristics as possible (in descending order of importance):
5. The user does not have to sign up for anything or log into anything to open programs, save files, or store files
6. Able to not be used as a phone, ever
7. Can play audio through a headphone jack
8. Can store files on a removable SD or MicroSD drive
9. Can be found, from a legitimate seller, for under $50
10. Comes loaded with, or can easily be loaded with, some kind of local/non-cloud-based spreadsheet software that can output *.xcel or *.numbers files
…and these characteristics are nice but I really don’t care if they’re present:
– Camera
– Bluetooth
– Internet connectivity
Does such a device exist anymore?
I’ve been toying with the idea of building “the smartphone for FOSS tubonerds” since the inception of such, but the fact that no-one else seems to have tried strikes me as evidence that it isn’t something really practical.
I think there have been some attempts, but they were not commercially viable for obvious reasons.
Are devices with physical keyboards even being made?
There are (or were a couple of years ago) miniature Bluetooth keyboards, which when paired with a compatible “slate” smartphone can roughly approximate the Blackberry experience.
A coworker from India visited recently. His phone looked like a regular full-touchscreen smartphone but extending from the bottom of it was a physical keyboard. So the answer to that question is “yes” though that alone does not get me very far.
I’d be open to this but the keyboard and phone would have to link together in such a way as to approximate a permanent physical connection.
Yes. Planet Computers has two models of a smartphone inspired by the old Psion pda, with a keyboard designed by the same person who designed the Psion keyboard. It’s about the size of a large smartphone, and you can actually type on it.
I’m not seeing any of these used on Ebay or Amazon. Any other ideas where to get one?
Also, how well do they fulfill #4 above?
https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/cosmo-communicator
The Gemini PDA is the closest thing I know of, but I wouldn’t guarantee that it satisfies your #4, and it definitely doesn’t satisfy #9.
https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-wifi-only
What you need is a small laptop. Maybe you can get something old and used for close to $50.
What laptops are that small?
There are laptops with 7″ screens like the GPD Pocket. It fits all your requirements besides price. Maybe you can find a used one.
I hate to be “that guy,” but what are you planning on doing with this device? The requirement to export Word files makes it sounds like you want to do word processing. But an 22 cm (~8.5 inch) keyboard is going to be pretty uncomfortable for that. On the other hand, some of the other stuff, plus the mention of the Blackberry, makes it sound like you want a cellphone from the pre-iphone days, back before Apple courageously took away our headphone jacks and SD card slots. And then you top it off by asking for something that costs less than $50, a price point that I don’t think even the cheapest off-brand Chinese Android phones can hit in the US.
Conclusion (?): I think you should just buy a bunch of new old stock of Blackberry phones. Buy half a dozen, and then you can party like it’s 1999 for the next few decades.
This would be my default option, but I’m not sure how reliable they’d be at this point. And I’m also uncertain of the availability of batteries etc.
I bought a circa 2012 Motorola ex431G late last year off of ebay (new in box) and it works fine (except the battery charging is kind of wonky. It won’t hold a charge for more than 2-3 days without recharging, even with a brand-new Batteries+ purchased name-brand battery. So note that the 7 year old battery still in the box was just as good as a brand new battery in this phone.). And my wife’s same model is working fine after her having purchased it 3 or 4 years ago.
So I think you’ll be fine with these Blackberries, and Batteries+ is a great place to find a variety of brand new batteries for old phones. https://www.batteriesplus.com/productdetails/cel11260
I will, however, be looking for an equivalent phone in 2 years when AT&T switches off their 3g network. Maybe someone outside of India will make one then? Otherwise it’s a flip phone again or maybe a Lightphone II.
There are people who macgyver their own devices based on a Raspberry Pi. You can get miniature keyboards and screens for them.
I doubt I have the technical skills for that.
Well in principle, you need:
* a Raspberry Pi
* a MicroSD card on which you put the Raspbian (or similar) Linux system
* a mini keyboard and touchpad, a Rii or something like that
* a small screen
* a battery pack
Voilà, your own pocket Linux computer, fit for word processing and whatnot.
Let’s say one homeless person in San Francisco gets the coronavirus. With hygiene and healthcare nonexistent and quarantine impossible among this population, is there any way it won’t be all over the city in a few weeks?
How much contact with other people do the San Francisco homeless have?
I’m sheltered enough to not really know what the daily life of the homeless is like, but here on the east coast, their life seems to consist of finding a spot to sit where they won’t be harassed and occasionally passing through wherever they can get some food. Not much contact with random people that I see, outside of the latter thing there, I guess.
Well afaiu they use the same pharmacies and grocery stores – if only as public restrooms – as everyone else, touching door knobs and shelves and whatelse on their way in and out. Even if you shop at Whole Foods, the stuff there may shop somewhere else. And grocery stores is the one thing most people can’t realistically avoid visiting. Also in SF you just encounter them on the streets pretty regularly, and the virus can be transmitted through air (I believe it’s droplets actually, but the result is the same).
THe homeless tend to ride on public transportation quite a bit, especially on days like the last few, when it’s raining. I’m personally not all that worried about catching anything at work, I’m worried about safely getting to work.
homeless people often use public libraries. it varies according to the person but they often socialize a lot with each other. I live not far from a nexus of stereotypical alcoholic (and/or drug-using) homeless people and on a typical day they spend a lot of time hanging out with each other. I volunteered in a soup kitchen and observed the same. others go to the subway to keep warm.
The Bay Area is one of the American coronavirus hotspots and nothing is being done to contain it besides Gov. Newsom asking all California senior citizens to stay home and asking bars to close.
Let’s assume no senior in the Bay Area goes around catching and spreading coronavirus, but everyone 64 makes no social distancing behavior changes. That’s about 7.75*0.88*0.5 = 3.41 million infections, though maybe not all within 3-4 weeks.
A lot of things are being done in the bay area.
– Greatly increased telecommuting.
– BART ridership has dropped by about half.
– BART cars and turnstiles are being periodically disinfected.
– Various actions taken at workplaces to minimize shared contact surface usage.
– Updated communications at workplaces on SARS-CoV-2 status.
Also, most schools in the area have been closed. Some libraries are closing as well.
Santa Clara County had previously banned large events (this was a topic of debate in a previous open thread, so the omission here is especially notable). Now the ban has been extended to all gatherings of 100+ people.
That’s certainly good.
I ignored the Santa Clara County measure because the Bay Area is, what, six counties connected by rapid transit (with feces on the paths) so wasn’t thinking of a county-level measure as containment.
@AlexOfUrals says:
“San Francisco will temporarily house members of its homeless population who are infected with the coronavirus in RVs for self-quarantines”
“On Monday, the mayor announced that the city would spend $5 million to deep-clean homeless shelters and SROs”
I work for the City and County of San Francisco, and I’d describe the mood as “of resignation”, my boss has ordered custodians to act as elevator operators and push the buttons themselves while frequently disinfecting them, the public libraries (where many homeless stay when they’re open) have been closed for a week in San Francisco, and next week they’ll be closed in Alameda County, The City of Berkeley, and The City of Oakland, public schools will be closed Monday, the grocery stores I’ve been to this weekend have been crowded and with shelves far emptier than I’ve seen before, telecommuting is encouraged – but no one I know qualifies, my wife is frightened that I’ll bring home a disease from the Jail where most of my work is, and she’s right to be, you may think of them as sealed off, but the jail hardly is, new inmates are brought in all the time for court appearances, many lawyers and civilian workers visit most every day, it’s crowded and the virus will spread quickly, what needs to be done is to close the courts for a while.
I strongly guess I will be (or am already) infected, there just isn’t enough disinfectant to go around.
People will die because of this.
So… he’s trying to kill them? Because being in a confined, badly ventilated space like an elevator is surely immensely helpful to infection.
The real issue you’re facing is masks, not disinfectant.
my wife is frightened that I’ll bring home a disease from the Jail
🙁
I’ve seen public defenders screaming that many prisons don’t even have soap, to say nothing of the hand sanitizers that were banned because prisoners tried to drink them. Do the people being held at least have that?
People in holding (i.e. just arrested): almost certainly not. People that have been processed and are officially “in jail”: maybe.
I’m a bit surprised we haven’t seen more cities suspend weekend jail sentences (I have seen some, but it appears to be a minority).
@Edward Scizorhands >
@acymetric has it right.
Except for when they flush ‘m “overnight guests” have bars of soap, those in holding cells for court typically don’t.
Courts should close.
I believe in my particular county courts did close, which is kind of a bummer for anyone in jail pending their first appearance (which is done via video, which it seems like they could still accommodate, but whatever).
Courts should close, and anyone you think isn’t going to assault someone else in the next month should be released on their own recognizance.
But judges are used to being Top Dog and no one gets to tell them what to do or what to think. They’ll need to be dragged into this kicking and screaming.
The CDC has specific advice for homeless shelters: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/homeless-shelters/plan-prepare-respond.html (not that this answers your question).
A follow up on the hand sanitizer price gouging situation from last thread, for the curious:
Statement from TN Attorney General
The simple solution of state redistribution of hand sanitizer in action.
Do you know where the hand sanitizer will be going? I hope it’ll be donated to hospitals and nursing homes.
He specifically said that he used them to bribe law enforcement.
Did they “volunteer” him for the donation? Looks like it…
Given he faces $1000 – $3000 fine for each of the 300 sales of ultra-marked up hand sanitizer he publicly admitted to making on Amazon, I’m sure he’s trying to cut his losses with a feel good story to tell the judge.
@Conrad Honcho,
In response to your question from the previous Open Thread, “How does a fern type?”.
My human typist/editor/whipping boy, Ludovico, takes care of posting my comments and stories here on Slate Star Showdex. He is most helpful.
[Hello, Conrad! -L]
Who authorized him to type that?
[Hee, hee. I can type what I like when CF’s not watching! -Ludovico]
Oh, okay. Hi Ludovico!
The year is 2120, and you are still alive. That’s surprising, since most of us were born back in the 20th century. What happened?
The calendar got set forward.
Why? I dunno, maybe a Y2038 exercise that got out of hand.
I’m a spry 125. Ah, what medicine can do in 2120.
The increasing popularity of cryonics lead to the government reclassifying it from “weird thing you’re allowed to do to a corpse” to a special legal status which involves being technically not dead.
Maybe it’s a tax issue. If you are expecting to be revived, you aren’t dead-dead, which means you can be taxed. And while you may not have income, you do have assets, namely the funds that you transferred to whatever organization is keeping you frozen.
They were fed up with billionaires freezing themselves in order to dodge the wealth tax.
The Basilisk is real.
Rejuvenation tech turned out to be easier and cheaper than we expected.
Aubrey de Grey was right all along and I was not strong enough to resist his corrupt magicks.
All our brains were uploaded into machines.
I made it to 2065 by natural means, had my body cryonically preserved using much more advanced techniques than were available in 2020, then got revived in 2100.
I’m being tortured for a heinous crime by being kept alive.
Hmmm, well, I’m only 130. My great-grandmother lived to 105, so I’m going to say I inherited her good genes, plus modern medicine has continued pushing the maximum age steadily older, and I didn’t get in any accidents or otherwise get unlucky (my tendency to avoid visibly risky sports at all cost may have actually helped!), but I’m probably not long for this world.
(That, or nanotech and we’re all immortal. That would be nicer.)
I somehow got onto a spaceship traveling at relativistic speeds. How, I’ve very little idea – maybe as a software engineer to patch the not-yet-AI computer as needed? I’m probably no older than 80 biologically, even though much more time than that has passed on Earth.
Unexpected coronavirus side effect: immortality. If it doesn’t kill you, nothing will.
Not much. There was that $15 injection in the 20s (2020s) that turned out to actually add about 20 years, to everybody’s surprise. The telomere thing. After that a long slog in curing every kind of cancer that pops up. A couple more genetic therapies. The breakthrough came in the 70s, with an efficient brain plaque cleaning technique – so most dementia is no longer a thing. By that time we already had replacement organs – some printed, some grown. Printed ones are a lot cheaper, and get better every year – newer kidneys don’t even look like a sponge in a bag anymore.
So we looked around one day and just saw people in their 120s playing volleyball.
Telomeres are so 2005. Right now senolytics and cell reprogramming are all the rage.
Irony aside, this is of course the most realistic answer. Rejuvenation seems increasingly real. This may be another boom-and-bust cycle, and there are no real results still, but the background understanding and urgency to act are on the rise. Diseases that, like COVID, preferentially kill the elders add to the urgency to cure aging as a disease.
The End of Days, The Mashiach, Tchiat Hametim has come.
What happened?
Neither Heaven nor Hell would take me, and so like Jack O’Lantern I wander the countryside moaning and crying (so, not much change there) 🙂
You are telling us that your real name is Tomlinson and you’ve been misrepresenting your gender all these years?
Dear sir, I have been (un)reliably informed that gender is only a social construct, so for all I know to the contrary I could in fact be a large mass of carboniferous limestone (the predominant rock in my locality) and indeed, if you take a prospect of me from the south-east, the resemblance will strike you! 🙂
It turns out quantum immortality is a real thing.
Unfortunately, while I’m alive, my body is quite decrepit and paralyzed. Neural implants let me spend most of my time in virtual reality, where I live a mostly-normal life. At the back of my mind, however, I know that eventually the resources needed to sustain the virtual world will run out, the stars will go dark, and my consciousness, somehow just barely sustaining itself, will be all that’s left in an otherwise dead universe.
@johan_larson says:
Medical care in the U.S.A. has transitioned from a “pay for services” to a “pay for results” model, and at 152 years old I am one of thousands nominally kept alive in chambers in order for “health care providers” to continue to receive payments for a heartbeat, I long ago descended into madness, what consciousness I have left are of dreams and pain.
I’d watch that movie.
Send a telegram
Didn’t Harlan Ellison already write “I have no mouth and I must scream”?
died, didn’t achieve Nirvana and reborn in a different body.
Gigantic nonfiction history books to read while you’re stuck in the house with your family and have nowhere to go but inside your own head:
Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government. A five-pound brick of hardcover history, over 1100 pages. Interesting perspective on Bolshevism as a state religion, complete with idols, martyrology, iconography, etc. May be more interesting to the people on this board than it was to me. I got about 80 percent of the way through.
B. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition. Read it for the father’s erudition, not the notoriety of the son. 1400 pages. I read this one quite a while ago, I think I reached the 80 percent mark. TL;DR, the Spanish church didn’t much like Jews.
Norman Davies, God’s Playground. A history of Poland in two volumes, about 1200 pages total. It goes into great depth about, well, Poland, so your mileage may vary. I think I read the whole thing. (There’s a slow section where a couple of paragraphs only consist of words only starting with the letter P.)
Winston Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times. About 2100 pages, over two volumes. A really well-written biography, though I wonder how much Churchill whitewashed his famous ancestor’s depredations. I read it all the way through.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. About 47,000 pages, if I recall correctly, but a surprisingly easy read. I think I gave up around the slog through Justinian’s conquests, re-conquests, and re-re-conquests, then picked up again with the rise of Islam. Maybe 90 percent?
Strong second to the recommendation of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation. I grew up Amish-Mennonite, so know the Anabaptist history well from primary sources (I remember reading the Martyrs Mirror in second grade)–and to the extent he talks about it, he gets it right. That’s rare. His Christianity: the first 3000 years is also great.
There is an audible version of the Decline and Fall that I highly recommend. I also can recommend Reformation, which also has an excellent audio version.
Note, however, that Decline and Fall is not really considered a great source of Roman history anymore. It is, however, an important historical document in its own right, due to its influence.
That can’t be right. Maybe you got an extra zero in there.
Or he’s got an edition with very small pages.
The “if i recall correctly” told me it was a joke. As in, it felt like about 47,000 pages.
About 47,000 pages
That can’t be right. Maybe you got an extra zero in there.
The Duke of Gloucester would probably think that’s about right: “Another damn’d thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?” (On publication of Vol. 1 of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire 😀
I feel compelled to point out that Gibbon’s reputation among modern historians of that period is extremely low. He often crosses the line from history (even history as understood 200+ years ago) to polemic.
Understood, but he was a great writer.
That’s a reasonable position to take. I’d just make sure that any recommendation was paired with “read it for the writing, be extremely skeptical of the history.”
I’m reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s history of the Reformation
Any interest in doing a review of it? I’m interested to know what the Protestant scholarship side of the aisle has to say on it, but unfortunately I am congenitally incapable of reading anything by MacCullouch, even though (even because?) he’s liberal CoE and nothing at all as Presbyterian as his name-heritage would suggest.
I’m probably prejudiced due to his biography of Thomas Cromwell, which again I have not read, but which Hilary Mantel wrote glowing recommendation for. And since she’s a total Cromwell stan and I very much am not, that unhappily means that I took agin’ him with the (possibly) mistaken view that he’d be a Cromwell fanboy too. So I could definitely use an unbiased judgement here 🙂
I’ve only read a little of his history of Christianity as an iBooks free excerpt but I was impressed. His use of ‘BCE’ and ‘CE’ was annoying, but maybe that’s me. Liberal CofE indeed.
I also recommend the recent Dominion by Tom Holland which I have just started, and In the Shadow of the Sword by the same author.
Yeah, I still mentally switch “BCE” and “CE” to “BC” and “AD” but I’ve relaxed enough about it to stop gritting my teeth, so long as the user isn’t making a Heavy Political Point out of using the terms. I can see why academic usage would have switched to it and “Common Era” is probably about as neutral a term as you’ll get for “calendrical system adopted for use/reference by majority of modern global society”.
I just want to know why we still have a day named after Thor!
@JayT
These days I think it’s just to peeve Loki.
I still grit my teeth and protest. “Common Era, huh? So what, Julius Caesar was assassinated on March 15, 44 Uncommon Era?”
Certainly not. Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in the fifth year of his consulship.
Do you want to take even the slightest chance of insulting Thor? Keep in mind, Actual Thor isn’t played by Chris Hemsworth, and is the true “Please don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” superhero of the pantheon.
The real question is, why didn’t we make Thor’s Day the start of the weekend, because what better way to celebrate than bottomless pitchers of ale and mead and subsequent drunken barfights?
The problem is that the book covers too much in not enough detail. At only 200 something pages, it’s way too short for what it needs to be. For example, he covers the fecklessness of our institutions, one of the four major issues, in 22 pages. This book needed to be at least double its length to give more than a cursory glance at all the things he wants to say.
Do you have suggestions on an “extended bibliography” that collectively gives Douthat’s argument the length it requires? If yes, I’d also be interested in a “four or fewer books, nine hundred of fewer collective pages” compression of said list.
I’m still waiting on Peter Thiel to write his full length treatment of why the US can’t do a Manhattan Project anymore.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth is the book on American economic stagnation.
@Atlas >
Are any of the Caldwell, Douthat, Klein, and/or Murray books worth buying to re-read and reference over and over again, or are they just get from the library worthy (yes, I could buy books and then just get rid of them but I find that emotionally difficult, and my wife is already unhappy with how many books I hoard)?
Good? GOOD!? Those movies are so very BORING!
Good would be resurrecting the genre of ’50’s style sci-fi films (Forbidden Planet, Them, This Island Earth, War of the Worlds, et cetera) instead (Them in particular, the U.S. Army fights giant mutant ants underneath Los Angeles! That is the kind of film our age calls for, not special powerful people fighting other special powerful people lameness! GIANT ANTS! GIANT ANTS! GIANT…)
They’re not boring movies, but they are safe. That seems to me like a bad thing, a sign we aren’t trying for artistic excellence so much as ticking boxes on a list of marketable features. I think however that there are more daring movies Atlas could be praising. But I’m interested to hear his argument!
That was my biggest impression of Star Wars 9. A completely safe generic movie, much like 7, but with less nostalgia goodwill behind it. (Well, that and the almost hilarious levels of retconning, like the movies were written by people who don’t get along at all and are duking it on on the silver screen)
Ross has elsewhere called Star Wars 9 the ultimate decadent movie. He seems to think that’s most of JJ Abrams’s shtick.
Would anyone care to explain what Douhat means by decadent?
I think we have a decadent society, but I’m thinking of music making people deaf and bodybuilding contests where people show off their muscles while being weak from dehydration because the standard is purely visual.
On music making people deaf…. I was thinking about decadence and the phrase came to me, and I was imagining it as being something from a Leigh Brackett story. Drying, dying Mars and ancient races and shrilling flutes. And then I realized *we* have music that makes people deaf.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with older pulp sf, one of the convenient tropes was that the solar system cooled from the outside in (not a crazy idea, and might still be sound for all I know), so Mars and Venus were habitable, with Mars having older civilizations which were generally in bad shape from resource loss and deteriorated social structures, and Venus was a jungle (humidity because we didn’t know what the clouds were made of) with savages. Humans from Earth were in between and Just Right.
It wasn’t always that simple. C. S. Lewis and Heinlein both used Old Mars/Young Venus in interesting ways.
@Nancy
He has a four part definition:
1) Economic stagnation
2) Lack of fertility
3) Institutional dysfunction
4) Repetitive cultural output
All of this is sustained in a peaceful, relatively prosperous society. It can be condensed to the idea that there is a closing of the frontier, whether economically, spiritually, or culturally.
Ross is following a definition by Jacques Barzun, quoted in the introduction:
Ross tries to refine it a bit:
Most of the introduction is actually on Amazon as a preview. You can skim this section if you like.
Thank you for the explanation of what Doubat means by decadent.
It seems to me that there’s usually a lot of repetitive cultural output because there’s always more demand for cultural output than there are plausible variations. It’s possible that some eras are more repetitive than others, but it’s a hard thing to measure.
I think that the Marvel movies are only seen as safe because they have been so popular. If I told someone in 2004 that the biggest movie of 2014 would be a movie starring a talking racoon and a sentient tree, no one would believe me. The avengers movies require that you’ve seen almost all the movies that preceded them. They had an overarching story told over the course of 20+ movies.
The Marvel movies have taken far more chances than almost any popcorn flick that preceded them, it’s just that pretty much every one of the chances they took worked out exceptionally well. A “safe” movie would be something like Toy Story 2-4 or something, where there is no real connection from movie to movie, and it’s just cashing in on a popular brand.
I think there’s more to it than that. You need to know who the major characters are to enjoy the latest movie, but I don’t think you really need to know the plots. If you dropped someone who’d never seen a single marvel movie into Homecoming, almost everything they need to know is explained. Sure, you miss some inside jokes and references, but as long as you have a vague idea of who tony stark is, you’re pretty much there.
Marvel movies are the most formulaic movies out today. Even when they “take risks”, they’re still using the same formula. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they certainly are not innovating.
The individual movies Like Homecoming are largely stand-alone, but the Avengers movies wouldn’t make much sense to someone that is coming in cold.
They are fairly formulaic, but in comparison to their competition, think about something like the Transformers movies, they have taken far more risks.
@jayT
Do you? The plot of infinity war is the bad guy (who basically didn’t exist in previous movies) chases after macguffins and gets them. While we know the stories explaining why several of those macguffins ended up where they are and that background makes what happens more meaningful, I don’t think it’s necessary to appreciate the movie. All the major character relationships that matter are explained in the movie, as long as you know the basic character outlines, you’re in pretty good shape.
Well, knowing the basic character outlines wouldn’t exactly be going in cold. As far as the movie, sure, you could watch it and be entertained because lots of things blow up and the characters say funny things, but I doubt you would really understand what was going on in more than a cursory level.
Heck, I’ve watched a third of the movies and I’ve still been pretty confused at points. For example, I had no idea what was going on in opening sequence of Infinity War because I hadn’t seen Thor: Ragnarok and thus missed the fact that a) Thor lost an eye and b) was on the run in a spaceship with the surviving Asgardians. I didn’t even recognize that it was Thor in that scene. And of course, there’s tons of cameos from the minor characters of all the various movies which just leave you going, yep, those are some cameos all right.
I want to jump in here to provide an anecdatum for cassander’s thesis. When I saw Infinity War, I had seen only two previous MCU movies (Dr. Strange and Black Panther, neither part of the main plot) and none of the TV shows. I was more or less familiar with the characters from pop-culture discussion and my memories of comic books from the 1990s, but I didn’t know the plots of any of the movies that I hadn’t seen. I found the movie very satisfying and did not feel like I was missing anything. (Much like Loriot, at first I thought that Thor most be Odin because of the eye, but the dialogue soon set me straight, and I didn’t mind entering a fight scene in media res. Nothing after that opening scene was confusing.)
On the other hand, when I saw Endgame, even though I had previously caught up on a couple more of the earlier movies (Ragnarok and Civil War, both relatively plot-central), I had a much stronger sense of missing something. Probably I would need to watch some Iron Man to get all the feels. That one was a grand finale, however.
Also, Endgame directly references scenes in the previous movies. Luckily, the one it focuses most on is The Avengers, which most people were likely to have seen. GotG, Thor 2, and Dr. Strange not so much.
Superhero films are not innovative within the scope of all film industry, but they are very much about expanding what is acceptable mainstream fare, nothing which to say of the kinds of technology development they’re advancing. It blows my mind to see the scenes with Rocket, Thanos, and Hulk interacting with the regular human actors. Aquaman was a revelation, and their CGI studio had to entirely rewrite their engine to do the hair simulations. As JayT said, things that would get you mocked as a weeb a few years ago are now highlights of their respective superhero films (albeit sometimes in watered-down form).
Writing-wise, of course they’re nothing special. Neither were the comics they draw from. (Even Watchmen was only innovative within the context of comics, not in the context of storytelling.) Superhero film writing is about proving why the textbook is the textbook, and affirming what gets to go into the textbook.
¿Porque no los dos? My library has this one as an eBook. It’s checked out right now but I put a hold on it so as soon as it’s back in it’ll download to my kindle.
Aside: twenty years ago I would have been on Slashdot screaming about how evil it is to create artificial scarcity of 1s and 0s at public libraries and linking The Right to Read and now I’m just like “meh, at least this is mostly convenient.”
One thing I’ve been struck by lately is how in 20 years, Right to Read went from crazy scifi dystopia to reality that largely passes without comment. It seems so crazy when you think about it.
The ebook industry is awful in a lot of ways, but practically speaking, it has gotten easier from year to year for me to find pdfs.
P.S. I agree with Atlas you can just get them from the library. I actually spent an Audible credit on Ross’s book, so I don’t even have the ebook. (That’s part of what’s stymied my writing more substantive replies; it’s all fresh in my head, but I don’t have the text to reference.) I’ve done the same thing with a couple of other political books. I might buy the ebook later.
I am interested in reading some high quality critique of General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by Keynes. I´ve read that book pretty thoroughly two times, and find it pretty impressive.
Marginal Revolution did a “book club” on General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money back in 2008, when it was sort of topical.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/11/new-mr-book-clu.html
That sounds interesting, but unfortunatelly it does not seem to be properly tagged and finding entries in a proper order would be painstaking work. Or I am just stupid.
… that is actually really hard to find, not because Keynes is right about everything, but because there are oceans of very bad critiques of him and they crowd out any worthwhile engagement.
I posted this in the last thread, forgetting that the new one was already created, so I’m reposting.
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.
Douglas Knight posted in the old thread:
Which seems plausible, but do we have any actual stats on this?
I think a comment in another open thread suggested that the higher prevalence of inter-generational households in countries like Spain could be the issue here, in contrast to northern Germanic nations and those colonized by them who kick their old people out. This probably makes predictions about higher elderly deaths in other nations with a family structure like that of Spain, which I don’t know the accuracy of.
Edit: Oops, beaten to the punch by seconds.
>in contrast to northern Germanic nations and those colonized by them who kick their old people out
That’s kind of backwards isn’t it? More like we kick out our young adults.
Aren’t both true, actually?
No? At least in America I’d say the most common practice is to move out/be kicked out of your parents house when you become an adult, and it’s somewhat rare for parents to then move in with their children/grandchildren afterwards. This is changing a bit, especially for those who can’t afford a retirement community or getting in-home support. But I don’t know of many situations where kids kick their parents out of the house when they get old.
Well not “kick out”, per se, but my impression was families sending their elderly off to facilities designed to care for them is, or at least recently was, quite common. In addition to adult kids being strongly expected to leave the house. Neither of which are as common in nations like Italy or Spain, was my impression.
Those are usually geographically dispersed families where the eldest generation has been living independently for a few decades and, when they are no longer capable of doing so, their adult offspring stage an intervention and say “Mom, Dad, come look at the nice nursing home we’ve picked out for you”. I’ve seen that scenario play out many times; I’ve never seen old people who were still living with their adult offspring being sent off to a nursing home.
IIRC Germany only count people who died because of COVID whereas all other countries count everybody who dies while infected, whether or not they were going to die anyway.
That would be a pretty big deal if true, no? Where did you see that?
I am pretty sure that at least one death in Germany is considered a corona death even though he probably died of pre-existing conditions and wasn’t tested until after he died (because his wife tested positive). This would contradict your claim.
German poster here. This strikes me as false, particularly based on the fact that we include people in the count who are found to have the virus only after they died.
Fun fact: the 1918 pandemic was called the “Spanish flu” because journalists in Spain had fewer restrictions on publishing information about the illness, which made it seem like the progress of the disease was worse in Spain than everywhere else.
The reason they had fewer restrictions is that Spain was neutral during the Great War, combatant nations had taken control of their presses. In war, the first casualty is the truth.
A friend from Madrid keeps being amazed on how people there ignore any form of social distancing. He’s been talking about it for two weeks.
I’ve lost the article that laid out the statistics, but one thing that appears divergent is the spread of ages infected in the various countries. Germany I believe has isolated its elderly well and 80% of cases are in the under 60’s (approximate numbers). Italy got caught on the back-foot at 60% of cases are over 60 and these people are much, much more likely to require intensive care. This requirement has compounded the issue as the lack of equipment is causing the death rate to spiral upwards.
In addition to the multigenerational families theory, it also seems like German retirement homes are now prepared better than the American one where half(?) of the residents got infected. Germany had a few cases of coronavirus in retirement homes, but I think usually not more than 5 people were affected, including the staff.
I only know of the one nursing home in Washington that was hit particularly hard though, and I think that only accounts for five deaths. That wouldn’t explain why Germany is doing so much better on fatalities.
These numbers only go up!
This says that 25 had died. Here is something more official and more detailed, but less definite. Of the 120 inmates, 26 had died (compared to 3-7 in a normal month). 2 tested negative and 11 don’t have results.
(Half tested positive and half have been transferred to hospitals, but not the same half. Why were they transferred? To get them away from the outbreak? But then why only half? Or are they sick but testing negative? Because that sounds suspicious.)
Ah, I guess it does account for a big part of the difference.
I heard the theory that in Germany the inquest (Leichenschau) is often done sloppily. Therefore they might have missed a few cases.
Could this play a role?
Sorry for spamming, because I just posted this on the previous open thread a few hours ago. But now that open thread is stale, so I’m posting it again, 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.)
Previous versions of this question: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/11/open-thread-149-25/#comment-865412 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/coronavirus-open-thread#fX3opvAw6nenMgpTK
The best argument I can think of is that we are unable to actually know how prevalent the infection actually is due to the testing problems, but that we do know there is a long period between becoming infected and contagious, and starting to show symptoms. So it is plausible that at least one person in the group could be infected and not know it, and we can’t really set a good probability with the information we have.
But we do know that if they get it and spread it to a bridge club of 26 people, in that age group, we should expect a few deaths.
So, how important is tonight’s bridge club compared to a plausible but unpredictable risk of a death?
I know this article is already being posted everywhere, but it can’t hurt to link it again.
Basically, with the age group this club is in and the uncertainty around real case numbers, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Thanks; I’d seen people mention it, but I didn’t realize how comprehensive it is.
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.
We don’t call him Boss Ross for nothing!
After reading Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now, I became convince that the best way that I can help is to alter the social reality that is keeping people from reacting appropriately.
1. reach out to individuals I know, and try to convince them to buy food, isolate as much as humanly possible, and encourage others to do so.
2. use social media to encourage the same
3. Mount a campaign at the local and state level to encourage drastic action (curfews, lockdowns, massive public health response).
To that end, I’m putting together a google doc outlining a strategy, putting together talking points, and aggregating contact information for local government. It’s here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BZaAqVIu8Pl9i8_CuVf1qd4b5nvrN-OWz7UsTDSn0j0/edit
I’d love input, or your potentially your participation. I don’t really grok the mechanics of state government, so my strategy is to focus on executives. I’m preparing a stock message, which I’m not super confident in – my writing tends towards the dense and obtuse. It’s Florida centric cause I’m in Florida. Happy to break it down by state or something.
My intuition is that calling e.g. the department of health is probably useless, and most likely detrimental, because they have important stuff to do, and they’re not the “deciders”.
I would recommend a “social proof” strategy – bring up the fact that all the cutting edge tech firms have already issued “work from home” guidance.
It would be nice if the governments announced that they would deliver supplies (especially toilet paper and paper towels) to elderly people who have to self isolate.
This sounds like a great thing. Added it to our generic contact your rep message.
On your “don’t touch your face” point:
If you can’t help but touch your face, what I do is grab the hem of my shirt-neck with my fingers, with the thumb pressed into the cloth further down. I then flip the inside of my shirt outward, and touch my face with the cloth-covered thumb (the inside of my shirt is touching my face, not the outside of the shirt). I don’t know if this helps much, but it’s probably better than using a bare finger, and is more comfortable than letting the itch continue.
OCD FTW!
I do the same. I made this habit years ago after being a teenager with bad skin and learning that touching your face tends to worsen acne.
So in Ireland we’re now well into the exponential growth phase – 40 new cases announced today, total for the entire island (North and South) 214 cases. 2 deaths so far in the Republic, both people with underlying health conditions.
As of tonight, the government is shutting down the pubs for the next two weeks (or rather, “calling on them” to shut down), as well as recommending people do not have private parties at home. Asking people not to have house parties probably won’t go well, as the kind of people who have house parties tend to have drink’n’drugs’n’sex going on at them as well as getting violent when drunk, so we’re not talking the most socially responsible citizens.
They’re also calling people home from Spain to fly home by midnight on Thursday and they’ve struck a deal with both Aer Lingus and Ryan Air about changing flights to get home.
Recommendations for Florida? Simple list of “social distancing applies to you, yes you, yes that means no hitting the bars at the weekend, yes that means no heading out to Joe’s for the house party, yes that means no flying out for foreign holidays. Drink at home if you must, practice hygienic measures, and don’t be a bollix”.
Oh, so you are shutting down the pubs after all, good for you. Czechia reports 253 cases, so far thankfully no deaths (but I am afraid they are inevitable).
If you can prevent the young travelers who bring the disease into the country from infecting elderly or sicker people, you might get away without many deaths. Let’s hope the lockdown does this.
Unfortunately gin is out of the bottle already. Besides, more important than foreign tourists appear to be Czech tourists returning from northern Italy. 16 % of those infected are over 65. Hope is that travel restrictions will stop new infected people from coming here and shutting down of social life will bring R down. But people are of course undisciplined and are trying to find ways to get around restrictions, since many of them do not understand seriousness of the situation, which is a reccuring problem in Western countries during this pandemic.
Florida is most likely in equally bad/worse shape – we have very little insight into it because the testing recommendations basically recommend not testing for community spread. I think that shutting down the pubs definitely an insufficient response.
The Netherlands just closed down pubs, restaurants, coffee shops, sauna’s and sex clubs, as well as schools.
There were lines at the coffee shops, apparently weed is an important thing to have a supply of.
People have been hoarding a lot, the shops have a lot of empty shelves.
ARMAGEDDON!!!!11!!
or not.
I realize that “coffee shops” is a euphemism, but I’ll have a very hard time not stopping in for an espresso. Restaurants and bars I could more easily live without.
People have been jamming into bars in America, too. We are full of idiots.
You probably should contact your elected representatives. At least this is what I did.
Another thing to take into consideration: most of the coronavirus warning stuff I’ve seen going around right now (articles, tweets, some YouTube videos) seems to be directed at people who are online a lot, are well-informed, and are probably already taking good measures to prevent spread. How do we most effectively convince people who don’t fall into those categories (I’m tempted to say ignorant/stupid people, but I’ll withhold judgement for now) to change their minds and start social distancing?
I tried to talk to people at work about it when they were saying “It’s just like flu!!!” I got called a nerd. I tried to talk to my boss about implementing work from home for her department. She said “Well, my concern is that there are going to be people who take advantage of it.” Otherwise a pretty decent boss, but absolutely terrible ability to prioritize there.
After that, I feel like I’d rather focus on getting educated people to talk to their educated friends and their reps. We’re about to have an easy, friendly conversation with my liberal, educated family about it, and a painful convo with my girlfriend’s conservative mom. Perhaps I’ll be able to report back with what not to say.
So I’m going to try to get everyone I can to call elected officials. This is the script I’m leaning towards:
“I’m calling you as one of your constituents who is deeply concerned about Florida’s insufficient response to COVID-19. This is a public health emergency without precedent in recent memory. The number of cases are doubling every two days, increasing five-fold every week. The only countries that have effectively controlled this emergency have done so through drastic action: banning public and private gatherings, imposing curfews and quarantine zones, and providing a massive public health response, including committing necessary supplies to individuals who are isolating/quarantined, especially the elderly. The countries that have failed to take these actions in time have seen their hospital systems overrun, causing a massive, needless spike in patient mortality.
You have two choices: encourage and take drastic action now, or take drastic action after our health infrastructure is overwhelmed. Failure to act will cause hundreds or thousands of unnecessary deaths. Please act now.”
Just want some social validation that I’m not being crazypants
> Just want some social validation that I’m not being crazypants
This might not be the best place then, since you’re more likely to run into people worrying about the economic costs of closing bars or whether the media is being unfair to Trump.
But for what it’s worth, I support this effort and wish you luck.
Seconded. Yes, cutting down on transmission is our only current option.
Best of luck!
Curfews are probably counter-productive; if people are going to be out, we want to keep their density as low as possible. Reducing the hours in which people can be active has a concentrating effect.
In terms of overall tone, I recommend running your script past some people in your area who are about the same age as the representatives you’ll be contacting. There is a fine line between sounding like you’re taking the situation seriously and calling on others to do the same vs sounding like you’re panicking and should be ignored. The script you have here sounds panicky to me, but might sound different to the people you are actually trying to convince.
In particular, I would recommend rephrasing “hundreds or thousands of deaths” to something less easily mistaken for “hundreds of thousands of deaths”. You also might consider varying the script – people tend to start discounting repeated verbal information, so having many people read the same script is likely to be less effective than giving them a short list of talking points with a few scripts to fall back on if they aren’t comfortable using their own words.
The actions you have described intending to take seem to be strategically consistent with the worldview you have described (being convinced by the “Why You Must Act Now” article). So from that perspective, you are not being crazypants.
I just watched Angry Birds 2 and am confused. Does anyone have an idea what was going on there? It felt like getting hit by a rainbow sludge of mixed up memes and propogandas
Ex-girlfriends are crazy, and over-react to things like being dumped at the altar.
Why did you do that? Did you really expect anything good to come of that?
Haha much younger siblings decided on the activity.
My rexpectations, aside from bright colors and ridiculousness, were imploded and/or subverted.
What should we call the crop of babies to be born around 9-12 months from now? Coronababies? Quarantine Kiddos? Wuhan Bat Rugrats?
Special Ed, short bus class of 2039.
If they’re affected then they’ll be the Zika of our time. Globalism marches on, and we need to defend it. Utilitarianism demands it.
I thought that this coronavirus didn’t hurt babies? A baby was born infected in China on February 5, but I can’t find any updates. And reports of the baby born infected in London on March 14 are written as if that February baby never existed!
I’d guess that’s because it’s a better news story to mention a newborn born with it than to go on to mention that the effect on babies seems to be a bad cold at worst thankfully, and undermine the horror of your plague-type story.
True; for these babies, no followup news is good news.
It doesn’t seem to cause symptoms in currently living babies, but we don’t know what effects it has in early stages of pregnancy, because the virus hasn’t been around long enough. Though it seems to affect young people the least (and pregnancy doesn’t seem to make it worse) , so there’s no particular reason to think it leads to birth defects.
Any evidence for that. Colds and flu (our comparators here) are not generally seen as causing learning difficulties after all, and Zika is something totally different. I suppose respiratory problems could theoretically lead go lack of oxygen reaching the brain, but there’s been no reports of this happening.
Prenatal ordinary flu does cause schizophrenia.
The 1918 flu had long-lasting effects on those who were in utero during the epidemic. We don’t have evidence for or against such effects for this epidemic yet.
In 2033, they become the Quaranteens.
OK, I’m going to be the goat that tethers himself for the T-Rex.
I remain of the view that most of the European Covid-19 response remains disproportionate and counterproductive. The only country that seems to have a sensible policy that I can see is the UK, in which I live. The cognitive dissonance of lauding the Tories is causing me some pain, but there you have it.
My argument centres less on facts than on values. Everyone agrees (more or less) that C-19 is lethal; everyone also agrees that this lethality disproportionately impacts on the elderly and the unwell. Where I seem to disagree with everyone concerns the fairness of the economically vulnerable picking up the tab for protecting the elderly and unwell. (And no, this is not some anti-boomer thing: I have elderly relatives too.)
So let’s consider Brenda. She’s a single mother with two kids; she works as an office temp worker and lives week-to-week. If she stays at home in a complete lockdown (à la Italy or Ireland), she loses her income, misses her mortgage/rent, and falls into debt she cannot easily get out of. If Brenda gets C-19 she’ll feel a bit shitty but she’ll get over it; moreover, with precautions she may avoid it altogether.
Then there’s Phil. Phil is retired on a modest pension; it would be a pain for him to self-isolate, but his income is secure and the government has committed to helping him. If Phil gets C-19 he could very well die, but it is generally accepted principle that those with susceptibilities have primary responsibility for not putting themselves in harm’s way.
I don’t see how Phil’s needs trump Brenda’s when Phil can self-isolate. So it seems to me that the responsible policy is to (1) mandate that the elderly and ill self-isolate with as much help as they need; and (2) ensure that businesses, schools, and reasonable forms of social life continue with higher precautions. After all, C-19 isn’t Ebola.
Why am I wrong?
Lethality isn’t the full picture here. Living through your spell of corona doesn’t look like sitting at home and taking it easy, it looks like requiring hospitalisation and active care for a double-digit percentage of cases. Unless you have a plan for stuffing fully 20% of your country’s population into hospitals so they can receive oxygen, your plan is one in which you’re going to see many more people die than the one where we try to do at least something about the virus.
Do you have a source the double digit comment?
Is this what will happen? I’ve heard that 2 in 10 cases become serious, but that includes the elderly and sick. I’m proposing that exactly these people self-isolate. Is it the case that 20% of younger, healthy people require hospitalisation?
Unless you have a plan for stuffing fully 20% of your country’s population into hospitals so they can receive oxygen
Lodore’s plan was “mandate that the elderly and ill self-isolate with as much help as they need.”
Once you are throwing gigabucks at a problem, a lot of previously-impractical ideas become practical. For example, Caregiver Carl is taking care of old people at a nursing home. He lives on site and his only interaction with the outside world is Delivery Dave. We monitor both Carl and Dave for any signs of fever, and if either shows sign, we pull both of them.
The UK worst case scenario is 20% of the workforce (presumably analogous to population) unable to work at any one time. That’s quite different from them requiring hospital treatment, never mind intensive care treatment.
I’d say the flaw in the plan is relying on the elderly to self-isolate. That’s the bit that caused my wife to ask “have they ever met any old people?” There’s a pretty strong strand of bloody-minded individuality in a lot of older folk, so I’m interested to see how thus plays out.
> There’s a pretty strong strand of bloody-minded individuality in a lot of older folk
It’s win/win/win! If they survive it’s because they followed government advice. If they don’t, it’s because they failed to follow government advice *and* it’s one less pension they need to pay for.
You’re wrong because of a lack of available medical support (oxygen machines, operators, beds..), and not just the elderly are going to need that support.
Also because there might be permanent lung damage for some percentage of those whom were hospitalized even after recovery
You’re assuming that people in lowest-risk demographics (Chinese CDC says 0.2% of infected 10-39 year-olds and 0.4% of 40-49 YOs died) won’t need hospitalization. If someone has the data for what percent of those cohorts needed normal hospitalization (which things like empty hotels could be turned into if we can ramp up the health care labor supply) and what percent ICU beds and oxygenation, we could say more.
EDIT: A Google search for information on people under 50 hospitalized in China or Italy first led me to, God help me, Vox.
“On Friday, an ICU physician in Lombardy — the epicenter of Italy’s outbreak — told JAMA there have been only two deaths of people under the age of 50.”
That’s ~1/600, even after Italian ICU capacity got swamped a couple days before Friday 3/12. It doesn’t directly tell us how likely you are to need hospitalization if under 50, but it’s a clue.
Elderly people are more at risk, but the deaths and severe cases are by no means limited to them. Remember the 31 year old doctor in China who died?
The correct answer is to due everything to stop or slow the outbreak and have the government step in to help people who are vulnerable economically.
You probably aren’t wrong.
The real reason for Brexit was exactly to be able to make this kind of policy decisions. Politically it is risky as hell, and the general left (blue tribe etc) would absolutely never go for it. Once again, I find Haidt’s Moral Foundations theory to be a perfect tool in explaining how each group will align. People centered on the harm/care foundation would absolutely never do anything like that.
I wasn’t in the room when they made their decisions, and I’m pretty sure UK’s strategy is NOT as simple as “let it burn through the young ones”, but I just can’t see how hitting pause on everything for a month when a vaccine is at least half a year away is going to solve the problem. It’ll save lives now, yes, but not the problem.
I guess steelmanning the conventional “flatten the curve” strategy is: delay the first hit of the exponential increase while we can make operational and social preparations for the long term. But I hope to god that’s how the governments are seeing it too, because if their plan stops at step 1, we’re not going to be ok.
Yeah, this is the real problem to my mind. And I fear that governments do not see flattening as part of a longer-term strategy, as much of what they’re doing looks like Robin Hanson style health signalling. Other lines of evidence come from the shame-policing that’s emerged on the topic. I’ve personally got it in the neck from family members about my “lack of empathy” and the Irish outrage over the British response suggests a clash of values that’s political rather than practical.
Then how come that the UK was able to make it during the transition period when it still has to abide by all EU rules?
Fair point. I actually meant it more in an abstract way – and in all fairness, their decision some years ago probably also covered freedom for “this kind” of incidents as well. Even if in this particular case EU regulations might not get in the way (or they may, actually. We don’t really know).
But I think it’s more interesting how absent EU has been in all of this. I know the chiefs of state kept in touch – ours waited until after a teleconference to hold his first public address of the crysis, so I guess it was pretty important (for him). But other than that, I didn’t see much EU.
Health is not an area of EU competency in general though is it?
See, this is the sort of thing which leads/led to the pro-remain side believing the pro-brexit side are either not thinking about the issues or deliberately lying about them.
The UK clearly had the freedom to do whatever in situations like this before brexit. Because that’s what the rest of Europe has been doing. They’re all making their own decisions, despite still being EU members. For better or worse, there doesn’t appear to have been a ‘Pan-European’ response to this virus. Just a lot of individual national governments doing exactly the sort of stuff the Leave campaign wanted the UK to ‘take back control’ of, like full on closing the borders.
To me, far from showcasing “The real reason for Brexit”. This just highlights that so much of the hysteria the leave campaign generated was empty guff and lies all along.
So, I believe the UK’s plan is right in stressing the importance of isolating the elderly. What people have missed about Italy and now Spain is the high incidence of multi generational households: usually grandparents live with their children/grandchildren. Northern European states and the US have the elderly living alone or in retirement homes. This is a potential god send in this scenario, because isolation becomes much easier, IF you prevent it from spreading in retirement homes.
A means to do that is to prevent sick employees coming to work in retirement homes. Usually, as far as the situation in Europe is concerned, these are terribly understaffed, and put high pressure on employees to come into work even when feeling a bit sick.
Crazy idea: Let volunteers/low skilled people chip in (after some very short training).
Some tasks like handing out medications or attending to medical emergencies can obviously not be taken over by low skilled people. But as far as I understand, nurses spend most of their times cleaning residents in retirement homes, which given my experience doing so with family members is not that difficult. Furthermore, if volunteers/helpers team up with experienced nurses, cleaning can be done much faster presumably.
Given a whole bunch of unemployed people in the service industry, the supply of helpers might be sufficient for this. Are there reasons why this might be a bad idea?
Retirement homes and the like can basically do that as it is. They might already be on it.
Of course, most of the actual retirement homes in my country have gone away due to governmental policy changes, but that’s a whole other can of worms entirely.
Would it be unbearably facetious of me to suggest that if I were old, I’d rather live in a multi-generational household and then die of [a very special kind of, if you like] the flu, than live in a nursing home and live longer?
I much prefer the multi-generational arrangement myself, and this was not meant as an endorsement of sending our old folks to wither away in nursing homes, but the quoted sentence does include the “in this scenario” part.
> nurses spend most of their times cleaning residents in retirement homes
This is *not* true, at least in the US. There is a category of staff known as a Certified Nursing Assistant which has even fewer hours than EMTs. These are the folks doing the majority of the “hands-on” work and get paid roughly minimum wage. Indeed, they are the majority of the staff in most “nursing homes”.
> handing out medications
A process which requires a nurse. And given how bare-bones the staffing is at many facilities, it’s the *only* reason legitimate nurses are actually working there.
> attending to medical emergencies
[Insert snark here].
> Are there reasons why this might be a bad idea?
Not at all. Except that you are years? decades? behind actual medical practice. Nursing is a highly-skilled profession. Like every [skilled|compensated] profession in the US, there has been a huge push to replace them with lower-[skilled|compensated] providers for a long time.
Where my wife works, the CNAs hand out medications.
Same here. I think the CNA’s just have to be supervised by an RN to be able to do medications.
If supervision means an RN on staff who never visits the site but has access to the online records, then yes. (I shouldn’t say never. I’m sure that the RN visits so many times per year. And probably goes over the records weekly.)
Interesting. Is it all possible medications, or limited to a certain subset?
I don’t know what it is in theory, but in practice, it’s all of the medications that the residents take. This is a group home for developmentally disabled adults, some of whom need constant supervision and some of whom go out and live their lives during the day (although not now). A lot of the work is wiping people’s butts.
I just reread “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation” by Raphael Carter, a short science fiction story about an imaginary genetic variant which sometimes causes problems with gendered adjectives. It doesn’t have a plot, it’s just about researching it, and finding that some of the people with the gene can identify hormonal variations just by looking at people. They can do it better than endocrinologists. There’s a deep dive into how knowledge works. And the story is funnier than I’d previously realized.
I think fiction about research is a worthwhile topic, though I’m not sure how to define things so that all the mystery stories don’t show up on the list. Maybe solving crimes shouldn’t count for these purposes unless some larger aspect of the universe is also uncovered.
Anyway, there’s Possession by A.S. Byatt, which is about people researching a Victorian poem.
Ash by Mary Gentle, in which a historian finds some very odd things in medieval France.
The movie Arrival and the short story “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang that it was based on.
As I recall, The Heart of the Comet by Brin and Benford had much more research than most science fiction.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
I’m really hoping to do a Borgesian type story someday which is about researching a wondrous fantasy society the author cannot directly participate in. If you make research a part of any science fiction story, it gives you a much better opportunity to gracefully lorebuild and expodump.
This is a reminder of the beginning of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a wonderfully snarky description of a way for research to go wrong. A bunch of English gentlemen have a hobby of researching magic, with the assumption that (I can’t remember which) either it was all fakery and delusion or that it used to be real but it never happens any more.
As might be expected, real magic intrudes. And part of magic is that it requires emotional sanity-risking involvement which isn’t consistent with calm examination from the outside. And yet, if I recall the book correctly, their research wasn’t entirely a waste.
HPMOR spends more time on Ender’s Game pastiches and standard fantasy adventure sequences than it does on anything resembling actual research.
It’s true that most of HPMOR isn’t reserch, but there’s some. I’ll settle for fiction where there’s *some* research.
Yeah, it was little, but it was memorable. Trying to find the rules for magic with the experimental method… How was that quote? “The long march of science will just have to start from the beginning, that’s all”, or something like that.
Edit: Ah, and the Draco bit about why the magic was weakening. One of my favorite parts.
The Aspern Papers, by Henry James, is a short novel about a writer trying to obtain letters from a famous poet’s mistress.
An interesting article about using data from the Diamond Princess, where everyone got tested, to estimate mortality rates from the Coronavirus. Their conclusion is that the age adjusted rate is about .5%, the rate for those aged 70 or over 9%.
This is death rate with treatment by a healthcare system not yet under strain.
I don’t think these numbers are necessarily inconsistent with the higher death rates we’ve seen in Italy and China, and I don’t think they necessarily imply undercounting cases in those places. Death rates with a strained healthcare system that cannot treat everyone adequately is much higher.
It’s like talking about the R0 of a disease. Every diseases that is still with us and not in the midst of an outbreak or vaccine in the process of wiping it out has an R0 of *exactly one*. The R0 is context-dependent. So is the death rate.
When people are worrying that millions will die, it’s because the death rate may be 10 – 20 % if the healthcare system is overwhelmed (which at the current rate will occur within weeks in the US, UK, Australia).
I’m also concerned about increased deaths among people who need medical care buy don’t have coronavirus.
It is important to note that the death rates are of old people who are healthy enough to board cruise ships. This seems pedantic, but is actually quite salient as health status is actually quite diverse in these age ranges.
My prior was always that less healthy older people prefer cruises because they don’t need move around as much to still get to see and do a lot of things. Whereas, healthier older people are more likely to go on a traditional vacation.
Presumably a lot of the older people on cruises are in middling health for their age. They aren’t the most able and they aren’t the most debilitiated.
In elderly people (70+) health levels are very diverse, there are people who don’t like walking due to a bad hip but are otherwise fine, there are people who run marathons, and there’s the (average?) old person who takes 10 pills a day and requires oxygen when they get the common cold. Then there are those who can’t take care of themselves and are extremely fragile. The marathon runner might find cruises too boring, and the bed bound probably can’t go, but all those between the extremes, I’d expect to find them on a cruise ship.
Without using the past 4 weeks as the only way to frame the situation, to what extent might Coronavirus alleviate political polarization? To what extent might it exacerbate political polarization?
None.
Quite a bit. The topic is entirely politicized.
(Epistemic status: thinking aloud)
Will anything alleviate political polarization?
I have to imagine that an external threat like China could. And the coronavirus has some potential there. To be sure, it will be treated in a highly political way by some, even most, but it seems to me like a consensus might form among the less mindkilled. We already saw this briefly with the NBA, when everyone from The American Conservative to National Review to Vox was railing against China!
I’m very ambivalent about the whole thing.
On one hand, my general approach to most political disputes post-1995 is that they are to a large extent a luxury good. Most political principles are very “big picture” attitudes, which are impossible to actually apply in practice. We can only afford to think of “the other side” as some sort of orc horde with no principals, morals, or good ideas because nothing makes us actually have to engage with them. My pet theory for what’s driving a lot of polarization is the end of the old earmark regime in the early Bush administration. Prior to that, people had to routinely compromise to acquire things like funding and pork, and this was a large part of what drove bipartisan consensus. Similarly, in our daily “real lives”, we routinely compromise political principles when we EG have family over for dinner or have to navigate formal niceties. I think this explains a lot about why, for example, vegetarians and meat eaters, or Trump and evangelical protestants, or immigrant muslims and the social justice left, and compromise in ways that Paul Ryan and I can’t seem to.
The argument here is that, to quote orwell, in many areas of life, 2+2 can equal whatever you want, but in a real war, 2+2 has to equal 4 (or you’ll get beat by the other guy, who rationally appraises the situation). now I don’t think it has to be anything as dramatic as a “real war”…but we suddenly find ourselves in a situation where the problem requires pretty explicit renegotiation of social expectations: maybe I won’t be at work this week. I promise I’ll get my work done, you don’t fire me. Maybe my kids can’t go to school…but you need to feed them somehow, or accept that huge portions of the population won’t be coming into work. I’ve been *amazed* at how quickly consensus formed on the right course of action to take here.
On the other hand, as Honcho points out, current reporting on this crisis has been fairly partisan in the states in ways it hasn’t been abroad, and I see this in my own social circles. My liberal friends claim that nebulous, unnamed, mysterious “trump supporters” think the disease is a hoax (I know of no Trump supporter who believes that). My conservative friends think the Democrats are deliberately trying to sink the economy to pin this whole thing on Trump (I’m not even sure how you’d go about doing that). Both sides, as they have since 2016, accuse the *other* side of being the anti-vaccine, anti-science crowd, and specifically accuse anti-vaxxers of having some grand-but-unspecified role in the current health crisis.
So who knows?
Any shared enemy will that/who is (perceived as) strong enough. Until the danger’s over.
I’m not sure we could ask for a better shared enemy than a virus.
An intelligent one with their own agency, operating also with psychological and social strategies in multiple varied and adapting ways?
I think there was one of those in Farscape.
@Nick
Had to look up FS. Now I got another reason to live longer. Thks!
Let me know when that starts happening. From here, it looks like everyone’s got exactly the same opinions they had two months ago, but with the threat of mass death and the actuality of mass quarantine to back them up.
I suppose to observe it at all I’ll have to first find some non-mindkilled.
I’m not sure if it’s a prediction, or just toying with an idea, but from:
The Party Cannot Hold by Michael Tomasky in the March 26, 2020 issue of the The New York Review of Books
So any merit to Tomasky’s prediction/idea?
I don’t take it seriously, since Duvager’s law means the two party system isn’t going anywhere. It’s a lot more fun (and click worthy) to predict meltdown than the status quo, but that doesn’t make it any more likely.
At best, we might see the borders of the party shift a bit, like in the last four years when working class whites when to the Republicans and educated suburbanites went to the Democrats.
I don’t know what the author of this piece thinks “Keynesian” means, but it doesn’t sound as though it has much to do with the economic theories of Keynes. Obama’s “stimulus” program was what a 1960’s Keynesian would have recommended to deal with a recession.
Maybe the operative phrase here is “old-fashioned”? I’ve generally heard Obama’s economic policies described as “neo-Keynsian”, which I generally take to mean “In the philosophical spirit of Keynes, but with some innovations and embellishments.”
I’m not an expert, so I just assumed that “neo-Keynesian” meant “like what Paul Krugman advocates”. I’m not sure what the difference is, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the role of monetary policy and the zero lower bound.
The demographics are stark, aren’t they? The Michigan exit polls showed 80/20 splits for Sanders in the young, and roughly the same for Biden in the +65.
And no, this isn’t just about the candidate. Poll after poll shows stark ideological divides on many issues.
And no, the young Democrats aren’t going to “grow up” into being just as conservative as they age. This is a story centrists and Republicans like to tell themselves to help them sleep at night. The actual evidence shows that ideologies are largely entrenched, with only a slight shift towards conservatism with age. We are looking at the ascent of the most left-wing generation in modern history.
So what’s going to happen? Unity seems impossible. A third party seems impossible. I predict a bitter, decades-long infight with sputtering victories and losses distributed between the two factions. And if nothing significantly changes (a big “if”), then eventually the left wins, and the centrists get the choice of either playing along or staying home (just like the left had to do in 2016, 2020, and the latter half of the 20th century).
I’ve ran the numbers on this myself, and it looks like if the demographics stay steady, it will be nearly impossible for the Democratic centrists to score victories by the 2040s. (Of course, if today’s teenagers/children turn out to be significantly more centrist then that date gets pushed back indefinitely, but if they swing even more left-wing then the date comes sooner.)
> And no, the young Democrats aren’t going to “grow up” into being just as conservative as they age.
For what it’s worth, I used to identify as liberal and complained that Obama was too conservative and once literally commented that “we need someone like Sanders”. Now I identify as moderate and I voted for Clinton and Biden in the primaries.
“But this time it’s different.”
There are people who study this question for a living. The data is easily accessible through basic googling.
Both things are simultaneously true:
1. People become slightly more conservative as they age.
2. People of the same birth year become “entrenched” as political cohorts. For example, people who became politically aware in the Reagan years will be more conservative on average, at a given age, than other cohorts when they reach that age. A 50 year old “Reagan era” person will be more conservative than the corresponding “Kennedy/LBJ era” person.
The people who make the argument that the left is demographically ascendant are not unaware of the first concept, or saying “this time its different”.
They are saying that, like the “entrenched conservatives” of the Reagan years, we have had a long period now (Bush-Obama-Trump) of entrenched liberals, and it doesn’t seem to be tapering off.
But one of the major phenomenons is that the majority of the youth doesn’t vote. And I don’t think it’s a bunch of leftists that are too lazy/uncaring/demoralized. On the contrary I think that’s the reasons they give, but really they are sort of proto-centrists. Those with extreme ideologies that ‘know’ they have the right answer vote their beliefs. But most people at that age aren’t super confident in their own knowledge/world-view, etc. In surveys and amongst their peers they’ll skew generally leftist, but once they grow-up a bit and are more confident with their place in the world they become the moderate/undecided/swing voters which actually is probably the biggest voting bloc in America.
We are looking at the ascent of the most left-wing generation in modern history.
If they can just bother to drag themselves to the polling booths and actually cast that vote. Sanders’ overwhelming support from the young radicals online hasn’t translated into “getting to physical places to express that support”, so far as I understand (you may know differently).
And “the left” that wins, this firebrand young generation, are not immune to the passage of time. They will get older, and finding themselves now entrenched as the party in power, they will accommodate themselves to that – see how Labour became New Labour in Britain.
Ocasio-Cortez is DSA rather than Democratic Party because of convenience, but the DSA is never going to be much greater than a rump or splinter movement, even if they do have hopes of being the tail wagging the dog via candidates like Ocasio-Cortez. Let her come back after retaining her seat in the 2022 midterms and we’ll see how her ascent will continue; personally, I think even if she does retain it, she’ll settle into the mould of a local politician: her brand will resonate with the voters in the patch she has staked out, but she will not be the influence within the Democratic Party that people were imagining in the wake of her election victory. She did manage to slap Nancy Pelosi around a bit, but Pelosi has recovered, and whoever succeeds Pelosi is not going to be in the Ocasio-Cortez mould but one of the party centrists who has spent decades climbing the greasy pole.
I’m sorry, what?
The party currently housing populists, establishment business types, all twelve libertarians, and white Christians is somehow not ideologically diverse?
I would have echoed this objection in 2016, attributed it to out-group homogeneity bias. Now I agree with it as far as the GOP is ideologically homogeneous in practice. Whether the Trump-supporting populists, Christian conservatives, or establishment Republicans won the 2016 nomination and then election, actual policy would have been much the same and dominated by the latter group.
I suppose that’s fair, and I guess it remains to be seen whether or not this will prove true among the democrats as well.
President Jeb would not have built a wall, imposed tariffs on China, renegotiated NAFTA, killed TPP, met with Kim Jong Un, bullied NATO into paying their fair share, or signed a peace deal with the Taliban. You would still get judges and tax cuts, though.
You’re still doing the outgroup homogeneity bias thing, and your conclusions are completely false.
The wall and trade deals I’ll give you, but I suspect Jeb would have pressured NATO members, just more diplomatically, and the NAFTA, North Korea and Taliban things were meaningless stunts anyway.
One more: He wouldn’t have pulled out of the Iran deal either.
@Loriot
As with any primary, there is a fight between the base as to which things make the party plank.
There was an ongoing fight in the Democrats in the 80s and 90s between closed borders Democrats and open borders Democrats.
Clinton in the 90s was really harsh on the border, for example. The open borders Democrats won, and those Democrats who really cared about closed borders went independent or Republican, while those who didn’t really care just shrugged their shoulders and accepted the new planks.
Similarly with Republicans and abortion, free trade, etc.
It’s easy with the outgroup to say things like “Democrats have always wanted open borders to import socialism!” or “Republicans have always been theocrats who want to control women’s bodies!”
But in actuality there are strong internal debates about those policies, then the team marches together to the new beat after the debate is resolved, with members for whom that’s a dealbreaker falling off to the other party or the political void.
Trump changed the party plank, which is the big reason that NAFTA and NATO mattered, not just because of the policy changes, but because Republicans now stand for different things.
Four of them are in the LP, and four more are nonvoters on principle.
When the Republicans were having their contentious primary in 2016, some people were making the same kind of predictions that the party would split. It didn’t seem credible then, and the same prediction for the Democrats doesn’t seem credible now. A third party competing for left-wing votes would be a huge spoiler.
Can we discuss what long-term social, political, cultural shifts can we expect after we emerge from the current crisis? Everyone loses in a crisis like that, but it seems like some groups lose less than others, which may give them an eventual gain in mindshare if not pure demography.
– Introverts gain, extroverts lose. Introverts are more used to isolation and have less temptations to break it, so less chance to get infected.
– Inner city dwellers lose, suburbia and rural populations gain. Greater population density likely translates to more chances of virus transmission.
– Family people gain, loners lose. Not sure about this. On one hand, a family has more external connections so more chances of getting infected. On the other hand, in a total quarantine, a family unit will find it easier to get through due to psychological help, sharing resources, and again, less temptation to go outside and socialize outside of family.
– Homeschoolers gain, everyone else loses. Obvious.
– In general, survialist mentality gains, carefree mentality loses. A perfect “told you so” moment for lots of people who were waiting for it all their lives.
– Remote workers gain (mostly a sliver of white collar workers), everyone else loses.
– The rich gain, the poor lose. Business as usual. So obvious as to hardly merit inclusion here, but still.
Not sure which ideologies will gain as a result of this, though. Of course everyone blames the other side, but will this shift the balance? Discuss.
“A perfect “told you so” moment for lots of people who were waiting for it all their lives.”
Who are these people that you are talking about?
Hardcore preppers
Even relatively relaxed hobbyist preppers.
@theodidactus
Thanks! I needed a good laugh this morning.
Mormons
Those of us with OCD.
A guy working at a panel on the sidewalk next to the traffic light laughed when I used my knee to press the crosswalk signal button. I told him I have mild OCD and am always like this. He replied “good for you!” and that he was being more careful with what he touched these days.
Was your elbow otherwise occupied?
Fighting off an attacker without using his hands.
I only use my elbow when it’s covered, or I absolutely have to (durned tall signal buttons!). This is OCD we’re talking about here. 🙂
Some people take R0 a little too seriously.
Biggest differences will be in the business world. Not sure how many restaurants will survive, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“Putting the economy on pause” for a month is science fiction. People still need to pay rent, buy food, pay mortgages (this month or the next, they still pay in full).
The other thing I worry a lot about (though it’s not really in the scope of your question) is that most ways the governments finance stuff counts on other entities lending them, directly or indirectly. Deficits=borrowing, inflation=taking from the population and so on. So there’s a transfer of wealth. But what’s going to happen if we hit a crisis, and there’s nobody to pick up the slack? “Reserves” are, by and large, fictional numbers in bank computers. There still needs to be somebody to actually give the wealth. And China’s not going to be there this time.
Restaurants are going out of business all the time anyway. And this time there’s likely to be generous government aid. Unless you’re a restaurant owner yourself, I wouldn’t worry to much. We will still have restaurants, just not necessarily all the same ones.
We might see businesses designed to purposefully handle smaller crowds.
Shooting from the hip: Imagine a stadium with 50K seats having a plan to cut capacity to 10K seats, with people spaced out. The government decides it’s time to start socially distancing and activates the plan, which gives the stadium a small payment, but lets some economic activity keep going. You would need better ways of queueing up people for foods and the bathroom, too. I don’t know if it works but we should think about it after all this immediate crisis.
Less crowding is going to be a challenge for NYC.
Meanwhile, I’m feeling cranky about people who talk as though the personal space you get in a car is immoral luxury compared to using mass transit.
I’m not crying for stadiums 🙂 And I mentioned restaurants because I thought it was relevant to the question – some businesses will be hit a lot more than others. Oh, and I actually do care about that one, two dear friends own a restaurant in a small town. They’ll try switching to deliveries starting tomorrow, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
The physical bits of the economy will still be there – the roads, the machines, the buildings, the tools. So predicting the utter collapse of the economy because that part went under utilized for 3 months and now everyone’s bank statements are overflowing with red requires the government to mismanage the money supply very, very badly.
Worst comes to worst, once the epidemic burns out, the printing presses can simply be run until the restaurants have workers and customers in them again, and the factories start back up. Yhea, that is likely to cause some inflation, but it is better than letting everything grind to a halt.
I’m not predicting utter collapse of the economy, god forbid. Personally, I don’t even see how the last couple of crises even touched Average Joe that much, so I’m not inclined to panic. But I do think that quarantines that touch more than events, bars and restaurants and last for a month or more have the potential of fucking things up a lot more than a mortgage crises. To the point where the average joe might actually feel things for a change.
Inflation lags monetary creation by a bit. This is why Germany could keep printing money in the 1920s and get away with it for a while.
Governments borrow money on the open market because they care about runaway inflation. If push comes to shove, they can shove it down the road a bit.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Yeah, that’s the theory. But if everybody pushes “pause” at the same time…
My aunt just told me the Dutch are staying home for 3 weeks – work included. She’s a dentist, so it kindof makes sense for her to get some time off, but if this applies to everybody you get broken chains and nothing works anymore. Say you find a way to build ventilators fast – but this requires working with 10 suppliers, which work with 3-10 suppliers each. And 90% of those are on forced holiday. You can’t make special exceptions – if you go that way that’s planned economy, and not only it doesn’t work nearly as well, but we don’t even have the skillset to make it work at all.
It’s only for those who can work at home and for some non-crucial sectors.
According to my copy of ‘The Great Disorder’ the German paper mark had lost almost half its value from the pre war years to the end of WW1 (4.2 in 1914 to 8.2 in 1919), it dropped to 64.8 in 1920, held for a year and then dropped to 191.8 in 1922 and then dropped to 17,972 in 1923.
Generally I think monetary theory is wrong, so take this with a grain of salt. I think the best way to look at it is that under the current system
1. The government determines the amount of money in circulation.
2. The markets determine the value of that money.
The amount of money in circulation is only a part, and possibly a small part, of the equation. Generally you don’t get massive printing of money in a stable equilibrium which makes attempts to tease out the relationship very difficult.
One important aspect is what is happening to other competing currencies. In post WW1 Germany there were essentially two currencies, gold and paper marks, which gave a direct and easy mechanism to get away from a debased currency. In many countries that recently or currently are undergoing high inflation they often have dollar denominated markets as well (legal, grey or black) and these places (I believe) tend to respond quite quickly to debasement.
With a cursory knowledge of inflations I would say that there appears to be a ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice you don’t get fooled again’ aspect where once a government has released the specter of inflation they have a lot of work to do to reign it back in and they are susceptible to a much faster break the next time.
Thanks for this baconbits9. I wonder how long the reset time is until society forgets and government can print money with a long inflation lag again.
> The rich gain, the poor lose. Business as usual.
That’s what happens after a small to medium crisis. After a really large one, like WWI, it can go the other way round – it completely demolished the aristocrat/rentier class.
It’s obviously hard to predict at this point, but I agree with dark orchid, particularly given the already strained opinion of capitalism in the states, and the general alacrity with which everyone acceded to genuinely attempting to “put the economy on pause” for a month or two.
You could very easily see a situation where people burn through their savings, rent and loans come due, “patience” among the landlords and creditors wears thin, they call in what they are owned, and everyone’s like “screw you.”
I’m not saying that would be a great idea (necessarily) but it could very easily happen.
“After a really large one, like WWI, it can go the other way round – it completely demolished the aristocrat/rentier class.”
Probably best to not think of “the poor” as just one group. The upper classes lost, some of the poor did better, some lost a lot.
Not only that, but people already gain and lose money all the time. Most of the people in the top and bottom 20% aren’t there in 20 years.
Is that true of wealth as well as income? I feel like the cases I’ve looked up before were about income. My instinct is that people temporarily change brackets of income regularly, but when measuring assets, the rich are quite likely to remain rich and poor frequently remain poor. I searched and couldn’t find anything that seemed to address this directly. Do you have specific numbers on the how many of the top and bottom 20% by net worth remain in the same or the adjoining quintile after 20 years?
@nkurz
wealth is largely a product of age. the 90th percentile of net worth for 24 year olds is 65 grand, for 69 year olds it’s almost 2 million.
@cassander:
Yes, this does complicate things. Perhaps compare percentiles only within age brackets? That is, how likely is a 0-20% wealth 30 year old to be a 0-40% 60 year old?
I’d still be interested in the non-adjusted numbers though. My instinct is still that at the rich and poor extremes, people tend to remain close to their levels. There are many poor seniors, and I’m guessing most of them were poor earlier in life as well.
There is a lot of data out there on this, and I’m having a hard time finding it right now, but one fairly obvious point of data would be the fact that almost 50% of 18-24 year olds are in college, with almost no income. So, those people on average jump quintiles fairly rapidly as they age.
Also, as far as seniors go, their incomes tend to be very low, even if they are fairly wealthy, so you have a common situation where the average person goes from the bottom quintiles, to the top, and back to the bottom.
Agreed, stock markets are crashing, landlords are not going to get paid, businesses are going close entirely, all of which hurt the rich more. Housing courts are going to be a lot less likely to evict anyone, until all this is sorted out. More people will likely die, but the ones that do survive will likely be in a similar situation to where they were, while rich peoples net worth will decline fair amount
I think the right is gearing up to view China the way the left has been viewing Russia for the past 4 years, at least rhetorically.
Well keep in mind that the Russia thing was/is a pretty transient position for the left (also, frankly, the right). I recall my conservative friends circa 2014 complaining about secret deals Obama struck with Russia in 2011 and 2012, and my liberal friends going to bat for Obama and Russia.
I’ve long imagined an interesting partisan fracture-line along China/Taiwan relations, with china-bashing republicans on one side and anti-imperialist PC lefties on the other. I’m being slightly facetious when I say I sometimes imagine “one china” becoming a social justice issue du jour of the left for a few months, but it’s not *that* crazy.
The 1980’s called, they want their foreign policy back.
I have now made it a point to watch a video clip of that debate every year, on the date. It’s going to start getting REALLY bizarre in the mid-2030’s
@theodidactus
I must be overlooking something obvious. Which debate are you talking about?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0IWe11RWOM
Long story: Obama had a “hot mike” moment with a Russian attache. He was making a tentative, and at that point somewhat secret, deal regarding nuclear arms. Presidents do this from time to time, but the fact that it was impromptu, and the fact that the attache replied with a lugubrious “I will transmit this to Vladmir” made the whole thing sound quite sinister.
Republicans IMMEDIATELY attacked Obama for selling the country out to Russia, which Romney cautioned was our “#1 Geopolitical Enemy”…many people laughed at him, and you got this golden debate moment.
Circa late 2016 the whole cast of characters switches sides. Now the right has no problem with cozying up to russia (and turkey, and north korea) and the left is sternly warning that these folks don’t have our best interests in mind.
The current Russophobia among Democrats is mostly an artifact of the 2016 election that refuses to end. Once neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump is a political figure on the national stage (so maybe in 20-30 years’ time, $DEITY willing) we’ll go back to seeing Russia as a burnt-out former power clinging to its glory days, rather than the sinister leader of the far-right “nationalist international” that it looks like now.
Well, there’s also the whole invading Ukraine thing. 2016 is just what made it so partisan.
It’s possible to think that Russia is a bad actor while concurrently thinking that Democrats are improperly associating Trump with it.
Likewise, it’s possible to think that China was legitimately abusing its position in trade while thinking that Trump went about things in the worst possible way.
But nuanced views are outcompeted in the marketplace.
@Loriot: Matt Stoller is getting some play.
From his most recent blog post ( https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/shut-down-congress-physically-at )
Good article. I agree with him. One of my disappointments with Trump is that he’s doing tariffs to punish China. Okay, great, I’m fine with that, but I want tariffs to protect US industries. If all we’re doing is putting tariffs on China, that just encourages manufacturers to go to India or Vietnam instead. No, do stuff to make them come to America.
Part of that was that Russia really was supporting the American Left around that time. Russian backed media in the US was hiring a lot of liberal journalistic talent that was being laid off by US media outlets, and they were given wide latitude to speak freely on issues not directly relating to Russia. Occupy Wall Street was the biggest example, as RT covered it constantly and called itself the “Occupy Network.” If you were a documentary filmmaker criticizing the US in some way, Russia was a ready source of funding. Of course, this cozy relationship ended abruptly once Russia invaded Crimea, after that and especially after Flight 17 nobody on the left wanted anything to do with Russia at all.
Most of your examples seem to be about short-term effects, not long-term. They are about whose lives will be disrupted less. For example, homeschoolers. Maybe in the long-term, the meme of homeschooling will expand. But who does that affect? The first order effect is that it benefits the people who considered a new option and decided that it was better. That is, it benefits people who previously did not homeschool by forcing them to consider a new option, the very people whose lives were (more) disrupted in the short term. This should not be surprising: every improvement is a change, a disruption.
There is the argument that the defining difference between right and left is that the right sees the world as a dangerous place where one has to defend things, the left as a safe place where one can experiment in order to improve things. I’m not sure I believe that argument — as I recently pointed out, both population and climate change have been issues where it was the left that was afraid of change — but if it is correct, then a plague should shift people to the right.
Not sure how it will play out long term in society; I’m noticing that the danger points for coronavirus are the social connections of the “Jet Set”.
That is, the people who have friends that go skiing in Italy, friends who do tourist trips to China/SE Asis, people who fly more than once or twice a year. Also at high risk are professional athletes, people in the movie business, and government functionaries who interact with traveling diplomats.
Will this lower the prestige if people in those categories? Or will it change the way they interact with each other?
Speaking as someone in the movie business, I don’t think this is too bad for people in the movie business as a whole. Some companies will no doubt go under, some projects will get canned, but the demand for movies will if anything probably go up: the last downturn was actually pretty good for the box office, and if everyone stays at home watching Netflix et al, well, they’re going to need more content. Exactly how we go about making that content may change (I’m now actively looking for projects that can shoot entirely in the UK using only UK residents, which would not have been a major consideration in the past) but I think we’ll be fine.
I retract this comment based on having now read the ICL report explaining the shift in UK policy yesterday.
If we are now looking at rolling shutdowns for the next 18 months, that is a huge problem for the industry. I had envisaged a return to public health policy normality some time in late summer, which now seems unlikely.
Inner city dwellers lose, suburbia and rural populations gain. Greater population density likely translates to more chances of virus transmission.
Not necessarily. In e.g. the 1918 flu pandemic the death rate for urban populations was much lower than that for rural populations, probably due to that population generally having been exposed to more related pathogens beforehand. I don’t think we can yet know for sure what will happen this time.
It would be cool if working remotely became more normal after this
I think it is persuasively demonstrating
* It can be done
* It has a LOT of really nice side benefits
* It requires a sort of collective social contract
I’m secretly hoping this whole crisis supplies an excuse to solve a lot of collective-action problems, frankly.
Me too.
This is why I plan to work my hardest during my next few weeks of telework, to shore that I am just as productive, if not more so. I say this as I comment on a blog during work hours
I’m really confused about the school closures thing. Some of the news reports are along the lines of “All K-12 schools and universities to be closed. Universities will continue distance learning.”
Does this mean K-12 students will have no formal learning during this? If so, they’ll all atill be advanced to the next grade in September, right? Does losing a month to 6 weeks or more of school matter so little that K-12 teachers will never notice a stupider Class of COVID-19?
Yes.
I have no idea about America, but here in France the schools seem to have just shifted to the internet. When I suggested to my ten year old that it was pretty cool to have a month off school she said “We’re going to be given work to do EVERY SINGLE DAY!” Didn’t seem too impressed about the idea..
My friends in Seattle said that students were doing remote learning, but it got shut off at one point because of equality-of-access issues. I forget where it’s at right now.
My school system in the Carolinas is closed as of tomorrow, for 2 weeks but (of course) possibly longer. There is no plan for remote learning right away (me and the wife are going to make it happen) but things are changing by the day. Every student has a dedicated Chromebook but it stays at school — I expect them to be released to homes soon.
Without some kind of remote learning very soon, the other choice is for the school year to extend further into the summer.
reminiscent of the “No online courses without closed captioning” or whatever it was a while ago. Pretty aggravating.
This makes sense. It’s not like the learning isn’t going to be made up, and it’s more effective (as well as more equitable) to have all the students making up the learning at the same time.
Maybe. Or maybe it would make more sense to try and keep most kids on track and do remedial work for the smaller group without access later. There’s no reason they have to stay with the same cohort.
Reasons why: Cost, access to cohort and friends (children learn in conjunction with other children, at least in public schools, and it’s not unheard of for children to be friends with children outside of their familial economic demographic).
Your argument ultimately seems to boil down to the sancrosanctness of the school schedule. What’s inherently bad about moving part of summer vacation to the spring, pedagogically speaking?
Nothing, which is why I didn’t make that argument.
It all depends on how long the closures are in effect for.
At least locally, I’ve heard that the schools are giving students work packets to take home, as well as chromebooks and Comcast credits for poor students without internet access at home. Apparently, there’s some sort of website for schoolwork as well.
In general the learning has to be made up in the summer. One of the benefits of having a long summer break, I guess, is that classes can continue until the start of the next school year.
This will actually be one of the best test cases ever for Bryan Caplan’s Case against education. Will there be any long term effects on students missing school for what looks to be 8 weeks? I’m betting no, and I really hope some researchers remember to check the data.
Credit markets will be changed significantly as a result of this. Junk bonds will be in much lower demand; small companies (and large companies with poor cash flow) will find it harder to get funding. This may lead to an expansion of the existing “shadow banking” system.
To put my money in the “shadow banking” system will I need a “shadow broker”?
No, just some good dirt on someone who manages an insurance company’s investments.
Anti-free-traders will be able to make great hay over this, if they’re any good at propaganda at all (which is a very big “if”). This plague is so severe because the world is so connected, and do we really want our supply chains dependent on a country that churns out a new killer virus every few years?
This is not a generic crisis, it is specifically an epidemic.
So I’d expect some of the links between pathogens and some types of
right-wing-leaning tendencies (emphasis on purity, emphasis on authority, etc.)
to kick in.
(Basically agreeing with David Friedman’s comment in
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/15/open-thread-149-5/#comment-865480 )
Well, this is certainly one way to put all of those priming claims about links between purity impulses and right-wingism to the test. If true, we should see a hard right-wing turn throughout the world.
Could also be that the epidemic-necessitated purity behavior and thinking satisfies a need, and purity demands in the political sphere will diminish.
That’s an interesting point. In the Moral Foundations Theory, purity is one of the five core motivations, two of which push you more to the political left, three more to the right. Why don’t we look at all five:
– compassion and care: I think it is stimulated by the crisis: we’re pushed to isolate but we’re also pushed to help each other, as in any crisis
– fairness and proportionality: also stimulated, I think attempts by the wealthy to get preferential testing, care etc will be a hot topic
– loyalty to the group: very much stumulated too, as the disease in most places is felt as something “foreign” and spread by faithless globetrotters
– respect for authority or tradition: I think this will be a huge winner too, whether it comes in the form of realizing how government is saving lives by draconian measures, or in the form of “none of this would have happened if only we were going in our ancestors’ ways”
– purity: winning too, agree with the commenters above
So, looks like all five foundations are about to be activated and stimulated in this crisis. Which will turn out to be the strongest? We’ll see I guess.
Interesting enough, as someone who is conservative, my instincts have been to isolate from everyone, protect my Ingroup, listen to the CDC, and don’t worry about what’s fair. This Implies that in a crisis, the moral foundations might reverse. The left sees the value in all 5 and the right only sees the value of 3. I wonder if there is any research on this?
I thought that was the other way around? The left doesn’t value authority/tradition or purity.
It is usually accepted that the left is driven by compassion and fairness, the right by loyalty, obedience, and purity. I see no signs of that being reversed.
Let me clarify my point. I know a few leftists that for the first time in my life are saying things like loyalty, obedience, and purity are important in dealing with this crisis, by with a reminder that fairness and compassion are important to. Meanwhile I know rightists that are saying I told you so about loyalty, obedience, and purity, while saying who cares about fairness and compassion, I need the people I care about protected. This is very different than Haidt’s claim, and I’m wondering if it is generally true, or just a biased observation?
Who’s saying to hell with fairness and compassion?
@aristides: interesting. I can imagine leftists reassessing obedience and purity (especially purity, kind of like HIV had delayed the advance of gay rights by a decade or more), but loyalty? Outside of family, loyalty to any social or ethnic group seems to bring little practical advantage now. And the sort of obedience that is being promoted by the crisis is the obedience to science-backed big government, which was already associated with the left more than the right. Finally, as pointed out above, the purity required now is limited and in many ways counterintuitive, so again, not necessarily reinforcing the right. So, while it is possible and in fact likely that we’ll see some overall movement of mindshare to the right, I would not overestimate it.
What about the link between the Right, ignoring experts, and conspiracy theorisation?
https://www.fitsnews.com/2020/03/16/guest-column-ron-paul-the-coronavirus-hoax/
I don’t think that the right-wing “purity” is a matter of infectious disease purity (nor necessarily of racial ‘purity’, this is not a *wink* comment).
So no change from right now. 🙂
I’m not sure this is helpful.
I fall in nearly all of the buckets you’ve listed as people who stand to gain. And yet, I feel sick. Not literally, like, psychologically sick. And not because I’m worried about the poor and unfortunate. Because I’m worried about myself. This is going to harm me a lot, compared to what otherwise could have happened. My absolute standard of living will almost certainly decline.
The fact that other people are less prepared and will have it worse than me does not provide me the slightest bit of consolation.
I understand you and I feel almost the same. Hey, even making this list was partly self-therapy for me (obviously, even though it was also useful discussion). Always look at the bright side of life, and if you can’t see it, invent.
But with all that, I still think some people stand to gain from all this, even if they feel shitty in the process, even if they feel much shittier than those who lose. What happens doesn’t care much about your feelings. If you’re the right person at the right time and place, you stand to gain whether you want it or not. Could just as well use your unexpected advantage for something positive, such as helping others.