Open Thread 149.75

Posted on March 18, 2020 by a reader

This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.

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1,015 Responses to Open Thread 149.75

  1. Plumber says:
    March 18, 2020 at 9:03 am

    Less depressing to me than the virus,  from: Education and Men without Work</b> by Nicholas Eberstadt

    “America today is in the grip of a gradually building crisis that, despite its manifest importance, somehow managed to remain more or less invisible for decades — at least, until the political earthquake of 2016. That crisis is the collapse of work for adult men, and the retreat from the world of work of growing numbers of men of conventional working age.

    According to the latest monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “work rates” for American men in October 2019 stood very close to their 1939 levels, as reported in the 1940 U.S. Census. Despite some improvement since the end of the Great Recession, Great Depression-style work rates are still characteristic today for the American male, both for those of “prime working age” (defined as ages 25 to 54) and for the broader 20 to 64 group.

    Unlike the Great Depression, however, today’s work crisis is not an unemployment crisis. Only a tiny fraction of workless American men nowadays are actually looking for employment. Instead we have witnessed a mass exodus of men from the workforce altogether. At this writing, nearly 7 million civilian non-institutionalized men between the ages of 25 and 54 are neither working nor looking for work — over four times as many as are formally unemployed. Between 1965 and 2015, the percentage of prime-age U.S. men not in the labor force shot up from 3.3% to 11.7%. (The overall situation has slightly improved in the last four years, but this group still accounted for 10.8% of the prime-age male population in October 2019.) Over that half century, labor-force participation rates fell for prime-age men in all education groups, but the decline was much worse for men with lower levels of educational attainment than for those with higher levels. Labor-force participation dropped by about four percentage points for college graduates and by two points for men with graduate training; it fell by 14 points for those with no more than a high-school diploma, and by 16 points for those who didn’t finish high school. By 2015, nearly one in six prime-age men with just a high-school degree was neither working nor looking for work, and for those without a high-school diploma, the ratio was worse than one in five.. “

    and it goes on, the gist is that the men’s non-instutionalized labor force participation rate has been steadily dropping since before most of us were alive (among both 25 to 54 and 18 to 64) and there’s a strong correlation between not in the labor and being unmarried and childless, and also with having a criminal background. 

    I haven’t seen any solutions offered. 

    • broblawsky says:
      March 18, 2020 at 9:21 am

      I have no relevant ideas, but for people who like looking at graphs (like me), the relevant number is the Activity Rate for Males Aged 25-54.

    • danridge says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:46 am

      I think a term that is used for this, and which might be helpful to know if you wanted to find discussion of it, is NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). I think a lot of the discussion is going to involve simplistic yet compelling images of a cartoon frog, though.

    • codesections says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:55 am

      I generally agree that this is cause for concern, but think that focusing too exclusively on *male* labor force participation distorts the picture in unhelpful ways. Across all genders, labor force participation is higher now than it was before the 1970s (though down from its peak in the ’90s).

      I’m certainly not suggesting that there are a fixed number of jobs to go around and that increasing female labor force participation leads to a one-for-one decline in labor force participation in other groups. However, given the broader historical trends (automation, skill-biased technological change, increased trade, etc.) I am not at all surprised that increasing labor force participation rates in some groups have corresponded with decreasing rates in other groups.

  2. Paul Brinkley says:
    March 18, 2020 at 9:10 am

    It used to be the consensus that the right way to protect your computer from malware was to run multiple anti-malware programs, on the premise that two or three of them would catch more than only one of them. Now it’s the opposite: we’re advised to run only one, because multiple anti-malware programs now present a larger attack surface for dedicated malware.

    Is this really true / sensible? When did this change? Was there a seminal study that changed the consensus or something?

    • silver_swift says:
      March 18, 2020 at 9:18 am

      It used to be the consensus that the right way to protect your computer from malware was to run multiple anti-malware programs

      Not remotely close to knowledgeable in this area, but I don’t remember this ever being the case. I’ve always understood that multiple anti-malware programs would just interfere with each other (and, hilariously, would occasional flag each other as malware).

      • Evan Þ says:
        March 18, 2020 at 9:51 am

        +1. To be specific, you should not run multiple antimalware programs as services running in the background with hooks into the OS, because they can and probably will interfere with each other. That’s how all normal antivirus programs run, scanning each file as you open it and probably scanning running process memory and several other things as well.

        You can, if you want, have multiple antimalware programs which you file away and occasionally run to do system scans. They wouldn’t be much use except to detect maybe-annoying-but-harmless adware, but you could do it if you wanted to.

    • DarkTigger says:
      March 19, 2020 at 2:46 am

      Using multiple anti-maleware programs is an idea, that I only heared from lay-people. I wont subscribe to it.
      Every anti-maleware software gives your computer a bigger attack surface (an IT-Sec Expert gave a nice example some time a go. There are several out of use word processor programms with their own file types. Even if you will never open such an file, your anit-malware software needs to be able to check this file because someone could. If there is a known vulnarability in your software, an attacker could deliberatly use this. Stuff like that already happened)
      If every anti-malware software finds ~95% of all malware, and there is an big overlap between those 95% for different sets of anti-maleware-software, but every anti-malware software has just a couple of vulnarabilities, your chances of getting an new infection rises faster than your chance to find something different.

      So yes, it is true. It was probably always true. IT-Security experts that are not paid by anti-malware producers have been harking about it for more than a decate.

    • BlazingGuy says:
      March 20, 2020 at 10:39 pm

      +1 that running multiple antivirus programs was never great advice. I’ll just add that the last couple of versions of Windows have included pretty good antivirus software; the average PC user probably doesn’t need McAfee or Avast or whatever in 2020.

    • rumham says:
      March 23, 2020 at 11:29 am

      Don’t believe that it ever changed, as they will flag each other constantly. But there have always been niches in portable media security which involved multiple companies’ databases. This one at one point offered 16 different databases to mix-and-match.

  3. mitv150 says:
    March 18, 2020 at 9:12 am

    I know an organizer of a large NCAA tournament pool that has decided to replace this years pool with a bracket-style charity selection. For their entry fee, every participant selects a charity. The charities are seeded and then bracket style voting is used to select the winners of each match-up. Each entrant gets one vote per entry (multiple entries permitted). Winning charity gets the entry fees.

    What are potential problems with this set-up?

    Is there a good free tool to handle the voting easily that won’t permit cheating? Off the top of my head, closed survey options may be onerous for the organizer to set-up, while open voting software could easily permit cheating.

    • Loriot says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:06 am

      You could limit the votes to people who paid the entry fee, which would prevent cheating, although it encourages gaming the system in other ways.

      • mitv150 says:
        March 18, 2020 at 10:43 am

        Ideally, the voting would be limited to the entrants. I’m not certain of the least onerous way to set this up – to give out a certain number of votes (and no more) to specific people.

        There are a lot of survey tools out there that permit limiting in different ways.

        For example, polltab allows you to limit per Google account (but not to specific Google accounts).

        I don’t know whether there is a tool that permits what he is trying to achieve.

        • Loriot says:
          March 18, 2020 at 12:45 pm

          Just email a unique code to everyone who contributes. This doesn’t seem like rocket science.

    • Douglas Knight says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:39 am

      Is this a real-life dollar auction?

      • mitv150 says:
        March 18, 2020 at 10:50 am

        Not an auction. It is kind of the reverse of a standard NCAA bracket tournament.

        Instead of making an entry and guess the winners of the games, an entry entitles you to enter a charity into the tournament. Then, you and the other entrants vote in multiple head-to-head match-ups between the charities similar to a single elimination tournament. The entry fees go to the charity remaining at the end.

  4. dreeves says:
    March 18, 2020 at 9:24 am

    The (virtual) NYC meetup last night was about the efficient markets hypothesis. Lots of fun discussion, including Eliezer Yudkowsky’s rebuttal of Scott Alexander’s take on cryptocurrency regrets:

    https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10156147605134228

    I endorse Eliezer’s take.

    Let’s even say Scott’s right that Rational Consensus said to invest $10 in Bitcoin 2011. The fallacy that bugs me is imagining that one could’ve thereby made $100k just because at some point later the price went up by a factor of 10,000. Because the Rational Consensus *now* is that it’s a huge bubble, right? Like Gwern said originally, a $10k price would make sense if Bitcoin became the world currency. It makes zero sense now. So when the price hit, probably, $1k, or maybe even $100, the rational thing would’ve been to sell everything.

    Following the Rational Consensus meant buying in for a small amount when the price was $1, and *mostly cashing out* when the price went up by, say, 100x. Maybe you’d repeat that reasoning and not sell quite everything. Then the price would go up another 100x and you’d make a few more thousand dollars.

    But in no way is it a rationality failure to have not made a million dollars.

    In other words, it *feels* super instrumentally rational to have invested a small amount in 2011 and cashed out at a million dollars profit in 2017 but that’s massive hindsight bias. Unless the consensus is still to invest now. But it’s not, right? I’m guessing we agree that the opportunity has passed and it’s not worth investing any significant amount now (less significant amounts, sure, why not). It might even be worth shorting it now, if there were a good way to do that.

    If so, then, if you had (quite rationally) invested $10 in 2011, the time to have cashed out is also in the past. Probably long before making profits worth writing home about.

    Also a quibble with Scott’s post: It feels misleading to say Gwern predicted a $10k bitcoin price. He specifically predicted a 99.95% chance of it *not* hitting even $5k. I think Scott acknowledges this later in his post.

    PS: A logical corollary of this sounds particularly weird but, as usual, I’m ok with the bullet-biting: If you made millions of dollars investing in Bitcoin, that was ex ante irrational! Well, assuming this is a price bubble. Getting rich from a price bubble means you merely got lucky. Piling onto a price bubble in hopes that it lasts a bit longer is not a good investment strategy.

    • anon-e-moose says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:28 am

      Piling onto a price bubble in hopes that it lasts a bit longer is not a good investment strategy.

      Interestingly, trend-following is a very popular strategy with commodities traders. You can find details by searching “CTA trend following.” There has been quite a bit of digital “ink” spilled over their strategies and their effectiveness, but on balance their products do attract investors and offer some level of decorrelated return. The mathematics behind these arguments are unfortunately outside of my ability to comment on.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:09 pm

      blockchain has fundamental limits on how many trades it can execute per second, and these are insanely low. That means the entire prospect of it becoming a major currency was always a mirage, and this was both mathematically provable, and.. uhm, this is going to be rude, but there is also no way this problem escaped “Satoris” notice. It was and remains a horrifically inefficient pyramid scheme, designed to part libertarians from their money.

      … the fact that it is inefficient – that is, it destroys far more wealth than it transfers – makes it just gratuitously Evil.

      • Loriot says:
        March 18, 2020 at 12:42 pm

        And even if you managed to solve the scaling problem somehow, the problem remains that cryptocurrencies are optimized for a use case that most people don’t have and thus pay a severe penalty in the metrics that people actually care about. As long as that is true, any hypothetical decentralized cryptocurrency would be outcompeted by a centralized currency, since you can just do the “the same as that cryptocurrency except more efficient due to trust”.

        There’s a reason bitcoin has always been expensive and difficult to use. That’s not a technical limitation, it’s inherent in the entire model. Likewise, most people like being able to get their money back when someone steals it or scams them, but irreversability is a core design goal of bitcoin.

    • Jon S says:
      March 19, 2020 at 11:01 am

      This generalizes somewhat. Anyone who got super-fantastically rich by founding/growing a company probably did a bad job of diversifying their wealth along the way. Maybe their utility function doesn’t care so much about their wealth, or they have some signaling gain from not selling stock, but for most people having 90%+ of your wealth in one stock (or cryptocurrency!) is a ridiculous blunder.

  5. rocoulm says:
    March 18, 2020 at 9:36 am

    Does anyone here have experience using U2F keys? I just learned about the concept recently and am considering using it.

    • codesections says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:24 am

      I’ve used a YubiKey for ~year now and have had no issues. I mostly use it to store my main SSH key as described in this guide (which I highly recommend for anyone with a use-case that includes accessing remote servers via SSH).

      I’m happy to answer any specific questions you might have.

      • rocoulm says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:54 am

        People seem to recommend having a backup 2FA method. This seems reasonable, as a single physical key could be lost or destroyed.

        But what do you use as a backup? Do you just buy two keys, link them both to your accounts, then lock the spare in a safe?

        • codesections says:
          March 19, 2020 at 7:43 am

          But what do you use as a backup? Do you just buy two keys, link them both to your accounts, then lock the spare in a safe?

          It depends on exactly what you’re keeping on the key. I keep my SSH key (or, well, my GPG key which acts as an SSH key) on it, and I have that backed up to three encrypted USB drives. I use three instead of one to guard against data loss/hardware failure. If I were more committed to best practices/more paranoid, I’d keep at least one of them offsite, like in a safety deposit box. But so far, I haven’t done so.

          I think keeping a second key would work as a backup regardless of what you put on the key, though.

        • Neike Taika-Tessaro says:
          March 19, 2020 at 4:05 pm

          Yubikey user here – I have two of them and indeed register the second one as a backup. One is on my keyring, the other is locked away somewhere safe. I am somewhat tempted to buy a third and give it to my mum, so it’s physically elsewhere (i.e. essentially following the general advice of backups), but I feel reasonably confident with my current setup.

          I use it to secure any website that supports it, which… aren’t many, but the ones that are really important in my life almost all do at this point.

          • rumham says:
            March 23, 2020 at 11:32 am

            @Neike Taika-Tessaro

            I have the same setup currently. If you don’t have a password manager, use one that is yubikey compatible. That way, even if a service you use doesn’t support yubikey, you can still use an outrageously complex password that you don’t ever have to remember.

  6. Bobobob says:
    March 18, 2020 at 9:54 am

    I’m currently reading “The Feeling of Life Itself,” by Christoph Koch, about integrated information theory (IIT). It’s the first book I’ve read about IIT, though I’m familiar with the concept from various essays and blog posts.

    The gist of the book is Koch’s claim that a computer simulation of a human mind cannot be conscious. He uses a simple, but evocative, metaphor. Cosmologists can simulate a black hole, complete with billions of separate data points, but the resulting simulation will not *be* a black hole and destroy everything in the laboratory. By the same token, neurologists can simulate a human brain, complete with billions of separate data points, but it will not actually *be* conscious. Gravity, and consciousness, are both causal phenomena that cannot be simulated this way.

    Koch does allow that if a human brain were simulated using a completely different computer architecture–one that replicates millions of synapses twined together with millions of other synapses in complicated causal loops–then, yes, we can assume that the simulation is conscious.

    Anyone else want to weigh in on IIT? I recall that Scott may have blogged about it, but I haven’t seen much discussion here lately.

    (By the way, do I get bonus points for posting a thread that doesn’t mention the word Coronavirus once? Oh, wait…goddamnit)

    • Randy M says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:14 am

      Gravity, and consciousness, are both causal phenomena that cannot be simulated this way.

      My intuition lies in agreement with him, but I don’t like the metaphor. A black hole is a physical phenomenon. A “simulation” cannot be the real object because, well, it isn’t an object at all.
      A simulated mind is really a misnomer, isn’t it? Since minds are not physical, the simulation isn’t so much a model, as it is an attempt to build recreate the phenomenon on a different medium.

    • metalcrow says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:22 am

      This doesn’t quite seem to follow for me. Yes, the simulated black hole will not be a black hole in our actual reality, but it will be in this simulated reality. It’ll still absorb everything, spit out hawking radiation, etc, all just only within the confines of the simulation. In the same vein, a perfectly simulated mind could be said to only be conscious within the confines of the simulation, but i’m not sure that that’s any different from actual consciousness itself. The reason a simulated black hole doesn’t kill the computer user is that simulated gravity can’t “escape”, but since other things that are simulated can (such as audio, video, or text, since we can, well, experience them when we use computers), i would argue consciousness falls more into this secondary category. It’s not clear to me to can “trap” consciousness in the same way you can trap certain other physical effects.

    • loophole says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:43 am

      Why does Koch think the way the simulation is implemented has anything to do with it? If you simulated a calculator particle by particle, it would still be a calculator: it takes in numbers and operators and outputs answers.

      By my intuition, consciousness is the same way: it’s a question of taking input and producing self-aware output. Doesn’t matter how the inputs and outputs are represented.

      • Bobobob says:
        March 18, 2020 at 10:54 am

        This is the part of the book that exceeds my current knowledge level. Koch claims that computer architecture uses only a feed-forward mechanism, which doesn’t lend itself to integrated information, but the wiring of the brain includes a complicated feedback mechanism that evokes consciousness.

        • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
          March 18, 2020 at 8:24 pm

          …computer architecture uses only a feed-forward mechanism, which doesn’t lend itself to integrated information, but the wiring of the brain includes a complicated feedback mechanism…

          Huh? Computers are completely capable of simulating feedback mechanisms of arbitrary complexity! For the most basic example, insert the following somewhere in a for or while loop:
          x -= 0.1 * (x - x_baseline)
          Woah, it’s negative feedback!

          Perhaps we don’t understand the point he’s making–I’m getting it boiled down through your relaying, on top of that. But looking at the wikipedia page for “Integrated information theory”…I can’t say for certain, but my “you’re quite possibly being Eulered” alarm bells are going off. I’ll have to read it again when I’m awake enough to actually try to understand the math.

          • Bobobob says:
            March 19, 2020 at 5:47 am

            I like the phrase “getting Eulered.” There’s an (epi)phenomenal level of hand-waving in Koch’s book that I’m not comfortable with, and I don’t have the computational/match background to counter his arguments.

            As a general rule, I think, everyone should get their Euler checked every six months.

    • Itai Bar-Natan says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:28 pm

      A photograph of a document revealing trade secrets is also a document revealing trade secrets. That’s because whether a document is revealing trade secrets doesn’t depend on the physical properties of the document or what it’s made out of, but rather the information the document contains. On the other hand, to say something is a black hole is very much a statement about its physical copies, so a photo or a simulation of a black hole is not itself a black hole.

    • Jaskologist says:
      March 18, 2020 at 7:43 pm

      We talked about this in the last OT.

      tldr; if a simulation is conscious, everything is simulating all possible consciousnesses all the time.

      • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
        March 18, 2020 at 9:20 pm

        After reading the discussions in the series of previous open threads, I’m quite unconvinced that “everything is simulating all possible consciousnesses all the time”. I’m with Scott Aaronson: The waterfall is not simulating consciousness; the waterfall is being a waterfall, and the hypothetical algorithm that maps sensory inputs onto initial waterfall states and final waterfall states onto outputs is simulating consciousness–or to be precise, it would be simulating consciousness if it existed, which it doesn’t.

        • Nick says:
          March 18, 2020 at 11:04 pm

          What’s hypothetical about the algorithm? The fact that we haven’t written it down?

          • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
            March 19, 2020 at 12:44 pm

            Precisely; it isn’t written down or implemented in any physical system in the real world. And if it were, that system would have to be simulating both consciousness and fluid mechanics.

        • Jaskologist says:
          March 19, 2020 at 5:02 am

          Can you elaborate? In what sense is the waterfall “being a waterfall”, but the transistor isn’t “being silicon?” Would you not accept the literal Turing machine (which is a strip of tape) executing a Brain program as being conscious? Are you sure you’re not just privileging the mediums you’re familiar with?

          These algorithms are no more hypothetical than the nth digit of pi. They definitely exist, even if humans haven’t observed them yet.

          • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
            March 19, 2020 at 4:03 pm

            These algorithms are no more hypothetical than the nth digit of pi. They definitely exist, even if humans haven’t observed them yet.

            I’m not sure I’m quite ready to bit the bullet on all mathematically possible universes existing. I guess I’m an agnostic as to whether pure math really “exists” in any sensible way. But whatever you call it, there’s a clear distinction between an algorithm that, given unbounded time and computational power, could be constructed; and an algorithm that I can actually run e.g. on my laptop. In other words, is there some ‘box’ into which I can put the inputs, and from which I can receive the outputs before the heat death of the universe? Let’s call an algorithm with that property “instantiated” to sidestep the philosophical question about “existence”.

            If consciousness is the product of some kind of algorithm, then that algorithm is instantiated by the human brain, and is not instantiated by a waterfall. There’s nothing I can do to a waterfall that’ll tell me how a person would react to a sequence of events.

            So what’s the difference between the waterfall and the transistor network? Setting aside consciousness (since we haven’t yet programmed a computer to be conscious), let’s take chess-playing as an example. The transistors of Deep Blue, in addition to being silicon, are instantiating an algorithm that can very effectively play chess. The molecules of a waterfall, in addition to being a waterfall, are instantiating…at best, the equations of fluid dynamics.

            If you somehow found a way to represent the inputs and outputs of a conscious being over its entire lifespan as a one-dimensional bitstring…I think I might be willing to say that the Turing machine executing the Brain program is conscious. I’m not entirely certain whether having inputs being fed into the system over the course of time, or having one’s actions have a perceptible effect on what one perceives, are necessary for consciousness. Neither of these would be possible for a turing machine, but both would be easily possible for real computers–the former almost trivially; the latter by hooking up the output of the simulation to some kind of body or actuators in the real world. You could hypothetically achieve those with the turing machine by having it also simulate the person’s surroundings, but at that point I’m not sure whether it would fit in the observable universe.

          • Jaskologist says:
            March 22, 2020 at 6:54 am

            Many of these algorithms are not slower. There are plenty (infinitely many) that are faster or the same speed. Our own computers provide many shortcuts to computation, over and above the actual Turing machine, which would be a pretty slow way to execute most programs, even though it’s computationally equivalent (for example, multiplication is computationally equivalent to doing addition a lot of times, but your computers have a special instruction for it that’s much faster, and so do you in the form of multiplication tables).

            I don’t think you can actually rigorously define what it is to “actually run” from a pure-materialist standpoint. Does a computation only “actually run” if some other conscious being observes it? But that would imply that you cease to be conscious if we lock you in a room and nobody ever checks on you again, or that computer stops computing if people stop watching it.

            I think you’re effectively just smuggling in dualism. If we are purely material creatures, then the physical processes that make us up can absolutely be represented as a bitstring, which can in turn be represented infinite ways (and is represented all around you).

  7. Evan Þ says:
    March 18, 2020 at 9:58 am

    “Social distancing” can sound like such a negative thing. It can sound like you’re keeping other people at an emotional distance, not just at a physical distance.

    Got any suggestions for a better term? I nominate “exiled for the good of the realm.”

    • Bobobob says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:06 am

      In one of the later (and lesser) Foundation books, Isaac Asimov depicts a society where there’s, like, one person for every 200 square miles, and any crowding above that is considered weird and offensive. I don’t remember if he had a name for it, though.

      • salvorhardin says:
        March 18, 2020 at 10:16 am

        The Robots of Dawn, I think that was.

        One also thinks of Kipling’s “As Easy as A.B.C.” where “crowd-making” is a crime.

      • Randy M says:
        March 18, 2020 at 10:18 am

        I don’t believe that was Foundation, I believe that was Robot. That is, one of the books with Elijah Balley and R Daneel Olivaw.
        I just started the third in the series with my daughter last night that we picked up used at the local library.
        I think it’s the planet Aurora, featured in The Robots of Dawn.

        • Bobobob says:
          March 18, 2020 at 10:23 am

          I think it may have been in the last Foundation book *and* the robot series (which I’ve never read). In the last Foundation, Asimov (extremely unwisely) tried to tie the two arcs together.

          • Randy M says:
            March 18, 2020 at 10:27 am

            You know, possibly. I did read that final Foundation book. All I really remember from it is Olivaw coming back and the two protagonists deciding to merge all humanity in case aliens came. But it seems likely he had them visit Aurora.

          • Eric Rall says:
            March 18, 2020 at 11:09 am

            Yes. In the Robots novels, Solaria has one married couple per ginormous estate, and culturally husband and wife are expected to avoid one another’s physical presence 90+% of the time. Normal social interactions are carried on through “viewing” (a sort of holographic videoconferencing), and armies of robots handle the logistics of two people running an enormous estate without any hired hands. Children are raised in centralized nurseries staffed by robots, gradually weaned off in-person peer interaction, and eventually assigned their own estates when they’re old enough.

            In the last Foundation book, Foundation and Earth, Our Heroes go searching for Earth and stumble on the original Spacer colonies first. Solaria is one of the worlds they visit, and the only one of the Spacer colonies they find to still be inhabited. It’s about 10,000 years later in-universe, and in the meantime the Solarians have genetically engineered themselves into parthenogenic hermaphrodites, removing sex-for-procreation as the last necessary form of face-to-face interaction.

            Solaria appears again in the last Robots novel (Robots and Empire), as well. There, a century or two after Robots of Dawn, they’ve cut off all contact with other worlds and are presumed to have died out. Our Heroes of this book show up in hopes of salvaging some robots, and only manage to escape with their lives because one of them (an ex-Solarian who emigrated to a less-extreme Spacer world in one of the original Robots books) speaks with a Solarian accent and this is recognized as “human” by the enforcer robots (turns out that the Solarians are alive and well, but value their privacy, and have worked around the “Robots must not harm humans” rule by defining “human” narrowly).

    • theredsheep says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:24 am

      I prefer something like “Being lazy for Granny’s sake.” Perhaps it sounds better in a language like German (“der Grannenlazien”). IDK.

      • noyann says:
        March 19, 2020 at 2:14 am

        “Oma-Schutz-faul”, (granny-protection-lazy) probably shortened to “omafaul”.

        To answer OP: “Physical distancing” [ETA: ninja’d…], “personal protection zon[e|ing]”.

    • EchoChaos says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:43 am

      Got any suggestions for a better term?

      Cloistering yourself to preserve civilization.

    • Nick says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:04 pm

      It can sound like you’re keeping other people at an emotional distance, not just at a physical distance.

      But I am, though.

      • Randy M says:
        March 18, 2020 at 12:58 pm

        Do you mean to reference the necessity of physical touch and proximity in maintaining emotional intimacy? I think this is a very valid and relevant point when weighing the cost of harsh quarantine measures–though still not comparable to what’s at risk, of course.

        edit: Ninja’s by John.

        • Nick says:
          March 18, 2020 at 2:00 pm

          Yes. Why does everything need spelled out? Was it that unclear? 🙁

          • Randy M says:
            March 18, 2020 at 2:04 pm

            Sorry, I mistook your debating society for a conversation. Probably due to the lack of social interaction lately.
            I shall try to give greater respect to the spaces between the words.

          • The Pachyderminator says:
            March 18, 2020 at 8:10 pm

            Fwiw, the reason it was unclear to me was that I wasn’t sure if you were making a serious point about the relatedness of physical closeness and emotional closeness, or a self-deprecating nerd joke about how you’re emotionally distant from others anyway.

    • John Schilling says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:56 pm

      It can sound like you’re keeping other people at an emotional distance, not just at a physical distance.

      The way neurotypical humans work, the two are inextricably combined. Even nerdy humans generally socialize best with some level of meatspace interactiion, see e.g. the physical SSC meetups we used to have even with all the latest information technology at our technically adept fingertips.

      This is the real cost of the current anti-coronavirus measures. And it may be a necessary or at least justified cost, but trying to tell people that it isn’t a real cost is just going to add a credibility cost on top of that.

      • Evan Þ says:
        March 18, 2020 at 3:21 pm

        That is (unfortunately under present circumstances) the case to a very substantial extent. However, it isn’t necessarily so. I’ve felt very emotionally in-touch with my sister and parents even when they were across the country. Worse, I think that saying we’ll be emotionally distant can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:01 pm

      Boring, simple suggestion: Physical distancing

      • Evan Þ says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:11 pm

        There’re advantages to being boring, and to being perfectly clear.

        • albatross11 says:
          March 20, 2020 at 9:17 am

          Where we are, the “lockdown” means we’re only interacting in person with members of our family or very occasionally with some cashier at a store where we went to buy some more supplies. (I’m thinking I’ll go grocery shopping later, probably in a non-medical safety mask used for particulates like dealing with mold and such. I’ll strip off my clothes afterwards and put them straight into the washing machine.)

          Playing tennis at the nearby courts, going for a drive, walking the dog around the neighborhood–all fine. Just stay >6ft away from other people.

          If you find you need some human interaction, I recommend meeting outside. You’re much less likely to share any virus that way, surfaces that might be contaminated are sitting out in the sun, etc.

          I’

  8. salvorhardin says:
    March 18, 2020 at 10:20 am

    John Ioannidis makes a good case (which I am very confirmation biased to believe) that sustained lockdown measures are of dubious utility and may not be justified, and that the topmost moral imperative right now is for more and better data:

    https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

    What is he missing, if anything?

    • codesections says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:19 am

      John Ioannidis makes a good case … that sustained lockdown measures are of dubious utility and may not be justified…. What is he missing, if anything?

      Two things leap out at me: infection rates and South Korea.

      From the article:

      If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.

      He spends quite a bit of time justifying that 0.3% number, but *none* on the 1% number. I am certainly not an expert, but 1% is far, far lower than I have seen anywhere else. Indeed, recent discussions of “herd immunity” have started from an assumption that a majority of the population will eventually contract the disease. And that’s *with* fairly significant social distancing; his hypothetical should use the transmission rate assuming no extreme measures for social distancing, which would presumably be higher than we are seeing now.

      If he is correct that we’ll see a 0.3% mortality rate, but (without social distancing) 80% of the U.S. population is infected, that would result in about 800,000 deaths (similar to 15+ years of flu-season deaths in a single year).

      And that’s if he’s correct about the 0.3% mortality rate. I hope so, but I have my doubts. Specifically, I would like to know how he squares his analysis with the data so far out of South Korea, where the mortality rate is almost exactly 1%. My understanding is that the testing regime in place there is pretty good, so I’d want fairly strong evidence before concluding that the true rate is wildly different than the 1% they’ve measured. (Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I’ve been *more* optimistic than many others; I agree that 3.4% is likely too high of an estimate.)

      Finally, a meta/epistemological point: he argues that we need more and better data. I agree, and suspect pretty much everyone else does too. However, he also argues that, in the absence of data, we should hesitate before imposing costly social-distancing measures, which he compares to jumping off a cliff. But the key feature of jumping off a cliff is that you cannot un-jump: once you’ve jumped, you’re fully committed to falling however far you fall. Here, we *can* end social distancing, if better data shows it to have been an overreaction; conversely, we cannot wind back the clock on disease transmission if the data shows a higher risk.

      More broadly, when faced with unclear data, there’s a powerful temptation to say “well, we shouldn’t act until we get more or better data.” But that’s the status quo bias in action – we *must* make a decision on how to act in the present moment, and poor data doesn’t remove our choice. It makes our choice harder, but if anything that argues in favor of a more cautious choice – which is frequently *not* the default choice of doing nothing.

      • aristides says:
        March 18, 2020 at 12:47 pm

        Disclaimer, not a scientist, just a person working in a hospital that has paid as much attention as possible. If the data we have on transmission rates can be believed, 50-60% of the population will be infected before herd immunity kicks in. A 0.3 fatality rate seems realistic, if everyone who needs a ventilator gets one. We do not nearly have that many ventilators. It’s hard to estimate what the upper bound of the death rate is without ventilators, but I think 10% is plausibly within the error bars.

        • eigensheep says:
          March 18, 2020 at 2:57 pm

          From elsewhere in the thread, 80% of people put on ventilators die anyway. This gives an upper bound of 0.4% death rate in a ventilator shortage.

        • 10240 says:
          March 18, 2020 at 2:59 pm

          Disclaimer, not a scientist, just a person working in a hospital that has paid as much attention as possible.

          (A question I’ve been curious about:) We can often read stuff like “20% need to be hospitalized, 6% needs intensive care”. Based on this, sometimes people estimate that all these people die if they don’t get a hospital bed/ICU bed because the healthcare system is overwhelmed. This sounds reasonable based on the word “need”.

          However, I guess where the numbers come from is that doctors have 20% of the cases hospitalized and 6% given intensive care as long as enough hospital/ICU beds are available. But, as long as enough beds are available, doctors may prescribe such treatment merely because it reduces the risk of death, not necessarily because death is otherwise inevitable. In your estimate, what fraction of these people actually die if they don’t get such treatment? Is it actually nearly 100%, or significantly less?

        • eric23 says:
          March 19, 2020 at 3:10 am

          Italy has something like an 8% death rate so far.

          South Korea has a 0.7% death rate, but that is unrepresentative, since most people there got infected through the church, and it’s a pretty new church whose members are mostly young adults. So we can expect higher death rates elsewhere, where infections are more uniform across age.

          In short a 0.3% death rate is not plausible.

          • matthewravery says:
            March 19, 2020 at 6:49 am

            It’s perfectly plausible in the steady-state where everyone who needs it gets top-tier medical care and you assume a demographic spread like the one in the US.

            The problem is we don’t have population-level data on infection for lack of testing. Every death rate you see is based on a possibly-accurate numerator and woefully-undercounted denominator. How undercounted? No one knows. People can guess, but there are orders of magnitude contained in the uncertainty bounds of those estimates.

            NB: I think 0.3% is likely low, but it should be within any reasonable 95% uncertainty bound.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:55 am

      Keeping high sustained measures going for long is always difficult.

      Josh Barro makes those points here, especially in his author’s note at the start. Locking down may be the correct policy now, but we are fooling ourselves if we think we can keep it up forever. We are buying time to think up other approaches and should invest that time wisely.
      https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/how-long-will-the-coronavirus-shutdown-last.html

    • rahien.din says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:31 pm

      What is he missing, if anything?

      His suggested approach is to not do anything, take some random population samples at defined intervals, calculate disease incidence, and then decide what to do.

      Most importantly, it would be unethical to do nothing so that you can learn more about a spreading pandemic.

      Statistically, he is unconvinced that we can interpret the effects of a coordinated response. His suggested approach would attempt to interpret the effects of the populace’s uncoordinated response. He thinks we should try to interpret a noisier dataset.

      So his suggestion boils down to “Let’s not do anything so that we can learn less.”

    • John Schilling says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:52 pm

      What is he missing, if anything?

      The exponential growth that’s going to be happening while he’s gathering data.

      If we want to keep the infection rate anywhere south of ~50%, we absolutely need sustained “lockdown” measures. We are past the point where containment by e.g. individual contact tracing is viable; that’s something we could have done a month ago and might be able to do two or three months from now, but right now we need to transform the entire population into something that transmits coronaviruses with R0 < 1.0

      Starting ASAP, and then sustained for at least a couple of months. Which is an argument against measures draconian enough to be called a “lockdown”; I think things like blanket closures of restaurants and theaters is probably a mistake. School closures for the rest of the current term is probably appropriate, maybe also shutting down bars and nightclubs and the like, definitely telecommuting where practical, and generally encouraging social distancing.

      But, given exponential growth, we really do need to start now and that only because we can’t retroactively start a month ago. A month ago, I was the one who wanted better data. Now we’ve got it, enough to justify action.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        March 18, 2020 at 2:43 pm

        > Which is an argument against measures draconian enough to be called a “lockdown”

        We are going to need to learn a bunch of new terms. I think I already got into one disagreement here on SSC because I wasn’t using the same definitions.

        Like the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System https://i.imgur.com/ghjfxBT.jpg

    • matthewravery says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:50 pm

      The things Ioannidis is most right about is the uncertainty we’re operating under. What he’s most wrong about (IMO) is that this uncertainty should lead our current actions to be more measured. I think we in the West mostly missed the boat on the opportunity for measured responses 6-8 weeks ago, and we’re now at the point where ignoring the crisis further could lead to calamity.

      It’s not the median case, or even the 80% case that’s worrisome, it’s the tail risk. The fact that we were so slow in testing, screening, and tracking has eliminated the option of waiting to collect more data. This data, by the way, would help us get a better handle on the likelihood of that “tail” scenario. Ioannidis seems to feel comfortable that such a possibility is vanishingly small based on his analysis, but I’m not convinced.

      Having said all that, I do think we’re quickly reaching a tipping point where the actions our leaders are taking are no longer no-brainers. Closing primary schools, for one, isn’t obviously correct in the way that closing colleges, large sporting events, and concerts are. In the latter cases, folks find less croweded ways to take class or entertain themselves. The former foists childcare requirements on unprepared families. Many of these, like Governor DeWine’s questionable actions with respect to the Ohio election yesterday speak to our lack of preparation. The way some individuals have reacted by panic-buying food, TP, and hand sanitizer speak to how confused the public is about the appropriate way to respond to the disease.

      Ioannidis is a really smart guy. (He’s the sole author of the seminal paper on the replication crisis in modern science, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.) But he’s also a contrarian. I think he gets the bulk of the facts and logic correct here, but I think he’s underselling how bad the downside risks are.

      • profgerm says:
        March 18, 2020 at 3:36 pm

        Disagreed on primary schools, despite the childcare issues, because young children appear to be almost-totally asymptomatic while carrying the disease: they catch it, they spread it, they have basically no symptoms at any point (source: TWIV 591 with Ralph Baric). It’s a major disruption to be sure but it would tear through primary schools (and thus parents, teachers, and anyone they contact) like crazy. That our economy is utterly and unfortunately anti-family is insufficient reason to keep throwing tiny germ-spewing incubators into enclosed spaces together just to feed them.

        If the data about children remaining asymptomatic is incorrect, I could be convinced that you’re right.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          March 18, 2020 at 4:20 pm

          I agree with you, but I’ve seen some (not all, not even most, but a noticeable minority) of the well-regarded professionals say that the record on closing primary schools is mixed. I haven’t seen their arguments.

        • Cliff says:
          March 18, 2020 at 6:45 pm

          I read that there are no known cases of children bringing the virus into the home. In all cases, children were infected by parents. Also in South Korea where the most testing is done, children do not make up that big a portion of the infected. The biggest group is ages 20-29 if I recall, by a lot.

        • matthewravery says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:51 am

          You could be right, I’m just saying that it’s not an obviously-slam-dunk-should’ve-done-this-weeks-ago type of thing.

    • bean says:
      March 18, 2020 at 5:14 pm

      He’s missing that his fatality numbers from the Diamond Princess assume that the healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed. Even really conservative numbers suggest that this isn’t the case.

      • Faza (TCM) says:
        March 19, 2020 at 3:22 am

        But an overwhelmed healthcare system isn’t an independent variable here.

        An example from the past couple of days (yesterday, I believe). A coronavirus testing lab here in Poland was shut down because two workers tested positive – a known risk if you’re working with samples potentially bearing the pathogen.

        Now, how you treat the fact that one of your workers caught something they were working with matters.

        If we assume a “COVID-19 is broadly similar to flu” model – the two sick workers get sent home on sick leave and the lab carries on as before, albeit at somewhat limited capacity because it’s two workers short.

        Under the present response model, the lab stops functioning at all, because everyone got quarantined. You are now one whole lab short and your remaining labs are more likely to be overwhelmed because they must pick up the slack left by the one taken offline.

        Keep it up and you may soon have no testing labs.

        This applies to other parts of the healthcare system, as well. If the assumption is “You caught the virus, but you’re generally in good shape (not old, no pre-existing conditions); you’re probably going to be okay. Go home to recuperate, we’ll carry on” the entire system is in much better shape than if the assumption is “someone caught the virus, so everyone must self-isolate in case they caught it too”.

        This applies to patients, as well. If standard treatment protocol is like for other respiratory tract infections – get a list of symptom-relieving treatments and a week to stay at home – with hospitalization restricted only to those that are in really bad shape, you can deal with a much greater number of infections than if you’re trying to treat every case as if it was the most severe type.

        I don’t have sufficient data to say whether we’re using our limited healthcare resources optimally, but everything I’m seeing leads me to doubt this is the case.

        • Garrett says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:31 am

          This is the big issue which is going to have the biggest impact. The “benefit” at least is that once those two employees recover, they won’t need to worry about being quarantined in the future. Probably. Which means that they can keep the lab running. Maybe.

          I’m worried about the same thing with hospitals and ambulance services. Until we have good protocols (I’m getting updates every ~2 days on what to do) we are going to risk having a *lot* of capacity go offline very quickly. Or we have infectious healthcare workers providing care.

        • bean says:
          March 19, 2020 at 7:30 am

          That’s not really my concern. My concern is that even the capacity we have won’t be enough. Yeah, if we only get 10,000 serious cases, we’ll be able to treat them. But those are really optimistic numbers, and the total number of ICU beds and ventilators just isn’t high enough to deal with more plausible numbers of cases if we let it run unchecked. Yes, we could probably treat some cases less aggressively, but the shortfall is like a factor of 10, so you’re going to need something dramatic to stop the body count being much higher.

          • Faza (TCM) says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:46 am

            What body count? We have 9,115 recorded deaths so far, worldwide over about two months. In terms of global mortality, this isn’t even noise.

  9. Act_II says:
    March 18, 2020 at 10:32 am

    I’ve been thinking recently about what I call “Muslim Obama” arguments. There has to be an SSC post on them somewhere, right? They’re a really common rhetorical technique and people were talking about them as far back as 2007/2008.

    It’s a type of bad argument where the premise is false and the premise doesn’t imply the conclusion. The canonical example being “Obama is a Muslim and therefore unfit to be President.” You want to reply, “He isn’t, and even if he were, it wouldn’t be disqualifying.” But arguments last longer than one exchange, and it’s pretty hard to keep arguing about two things simultaneously (and to someone who isn’t listening closely, trying to do so in this case can sound like you’re contradicting yourself). So you get roped into focusing on just one of the assertions, leaving the other one mostly unchallenged.

    It feels like a slightly subtler version of a Gish Gallop. It’s relatively easy to respond to in a written setting with good-faith participants and an attentive, persuadable audience. But in any other setting, it’s stronger than it has any right to be.

    • Matt M says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:38 am

      I know you’re trying to make a more general point, but in this specific example I think it falls into “the coverup is worse than the crime” space.

      It’s not that being a Muslim would disqualify Obama. It’s that engaging in a massive conspiracy to lie about and cover up his true religion would be disqualifying, for him or for anyone, regardless of what the religion actually was.

      (FWIW, I had plenty of left-wing friends who were absolutely certain that Obama was a secret atheist and was only pretending to be Christian to win votes, but they thought this was absolutely a good thing!)

      • Chalid says:
        March 18, 2020 at 10:53 am

        I don’t know that professing Christian faith to win Christian votes is any worse than claiming a deep affection for ethanol subsidies to win Iowan farmer votes. It’s probably better in that at least it doesn’t directly lead to bad policies.

        • Matt M says:
          March 18, 2020 at 10:58 am

          I don’t know that professing Christian faith to win Christian votes is any worse than claiming a deep affection for ethanol subsidies to win Iowan farmer votes.

          Fair enough.

          Oh, I also recall part of the argument went something like “Obama was raised Muslim, which means that serious Muslims consider him an apostate, which demands he be put to death. How can such a person expect to maintain positive relations in the middle east?”

      • Act_II says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:35 am

        At the risk of getting bogged down in a decade-dead argument: I don’t agree. The operative word in the “Obama is a secret Muslim” claim was not “secret,” but “Muslim”. It was a nakedly obvious attempt to play on fear and/or distrust of Muslims.

        This is exactly why it’s a two-pronged argument! If the only allegation is “secret coverup” then the only response is to debunk the coverup. But the allegations are “secret coverup” and an implied “Muslims bad”. If you mainly address the coverup, then you implicitly accept that if he were Muslim, it would be disqualifying (and the more effort you put into your debunking, the more you reinforce that — since why would you be trying so hard to disprove it if it weren’t a bad thing?) This is still a victory for them. And if you try to address the “Muslim bad” thing instead, you cede to your opponent that Obama might be a Muslim. If you succeed, great, but you probably won’t — the argument is based on appealing to defensive emotions, which are really hard to defuse with reason.

        • EchoChaos says:
          March 18, 2020 at 11:38 am

          Being a Muslim is in fact disqualifying for election in the United States in the sense of you can’t win an election nationwide as a Muslim.

          • Chalid says:
            March 18, 2020 at 11:49 am

            By Nov 2008, Bush was unpopular enough that I think a Muslim Obama would have won. (Though he would not have gotten through the primary.)

          • eric23 says:
            March 19, 2020 at 3:03 am

            That sounds like a questionable assertion to me

          • albatross11 says:
            March 20, 2020 at 8:42 am

            After the 2008 financial meltdown, it was going to be very hard for a Republican to win the white house, but I suspect an openly Muslim Obama would have had a tough uphill climb to win even in that environment.

        • John Schilling says:
          March 18, 2020 at 12:43 pm

          At the risk of getting bogged down in a decade-dead argument: I don’t agree. The operative word in the “Obama is a secret Muslim” claim was not “secret,” but “Muslim”. It was a nakedly obvious attempt to play on fear and/or distrust of Muslims.

          This. There is no shortage of US politicians, particularly on the Democratic side, who can be reasonably suspected of being secret Atheists or at least Agnostics. These are frequently attacked from the right on the basis of their being Godless Atheists; I’ve never heard a one of the attackers say “Well, if you were openly Atheist that would be OK, it’s the secrecy we object to”. It’s the Atheism, stupid. Or the Islam, or the anything else except at least pretending to be a Christian or a Jew, and if you’re not one of those two the right wants you to fake it. And if you’re a Jew they want you to fake that as being just a cultural thing.

          • Randy M says:
            March 18, 2020 at 12:53 pm

            This kind of pretense is basically a form of lying by omission, which is fairly commonplace among politicians, as well as is the more direct kind. So one is really only going to object to it when it conceals something one already dislikes, as hypocritical as that is in practice.

        • HeelBearCub says:
          March 18, 2020 at 6:30 pm

          Nobody is getting accused of being a secret Episcopalian.

    • Secretly French says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:51 am

      I think the kinds of people making those kinds of statements really do believe that islam disqualifies one for presidency; not technically (as if they care about following rules when it conflicts with their moral instincts, especially if those rules were written by distant effete and likely pure evil people in Washington DC lmao), but morally. Therefore you will be regarded amongst them as disingenuous as best, and more likely as a god damn ****in’ smug ***hole commie liberal ****** if you condescend to tell them what technically does and does not disqualify one for candidacy for the office of leader of the free world.

      • Act_II says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:09 am

        Yes, I was talking in terms of morality as well. The issue isn’t the type of argument, but the fact that you have to make two almost-contradictory responses at once.

      • Alexander Turok says:
        March 18, 2020 at 12:07 pm

        (as if they care about following rules when it conflicts with their moral instincts, especially if those rules were written by distant effete and likely pure evil people in Washington DC lmao)

        They aren’t going to identify the people who wrote the constitution with the current inhabitants of Washington D.C. And they wouldn’t be wrong, what percentage of D.C. residents are descended from those who fought in the Revolutionary War?

        Therefore you will be regarded amongst them as disingenuous as best, and more likely as a god damn ****in’ smug ***hole commie liberal ****** if you condescend to tell them what technically does and does not disqualify one for candidacy for the office of leader of the free world.

        Yep, no one has ever argued there is a constitutional prohibition on Muslims in the Presidency, so they would not be pleased at that straw-man argument.

      • Noah says:
        March 18, 2020 at 1:25 pm

        If I think being a Muslim is disqualifying on an electoral level, saying it isn’t constitutionally disqualifying doesn’t address my argument.

        Try substituting “mass murderer”:
        Person A: This candidate is actually a mass murderer.
        Person B: So? The constitution doesn’t prohibit a mass murderer from being elected president.

      • albatross11 says:
        March 20, 2020 at 9:00 am

        I think the polling numbers show that being a Muslim or atheist will get a substantial number of both parties’ voters not to vote for you, so the claim does have some political relevance. Maybe it shouldn’t (it doesn’t for me), but it still does in the minds of enough voters that it would probably change the outcome of an election if it were widely believed. Indeed, I think Mitt Romney lost some votes for being Mormon, for similar reasons. (Mormons vote like evangelical Christians and are very much red tribe, but their religion is far enough from mainstream Christianity to be off-putting to many people, and they have some silly-sounding beliefs that aren’t the same as the silly-sounding beliefs that Christians have grown up with.)

        There are a lot of attacks that are slimy in some ways, but are also politically effective. The one that sticks in my mind was a push poll telling people that John McCain had an black child he was raising with his other kids; he and his wife had actually adopted the child and paid for a bunch of medical stuff she needed that were out-of-reach for most people but pocket-change for them. So this managed to be an attack that turned a genuinely virtuous thing into a point of attack.

        The thing is, there aren’t any rules for what criteria voters may use to decide whom to vote for. If the voters hate blacks, gays, Muslims, Jews, people who wear funny hats, old people, ugly people, etc., they can vote accordingly, and while anyone is within their rights to say those voters are idiots, the votes still count. That means these attacks can work. Someone on my side launches these attacks, with a fig leaf of deniability about involvement from the candidate or party leadership, and your side cries foul, and then later on we swap sides and do it the other way, and nobody twitches a brain cell worrying about the inconsistency.

        On the other hand, voters seem to actually be pretty flexible about the criteria they apply. Bernie is pretty obviously not religious, though he’s culturally Jewish. Bernie and Biden are both old white men. Trump is a lifelong playboy on his nth trophy wife, who was caught paying off a pornstar to raise his bastard child, is less plausible as a representative of red state values than Elizabeth Warren was as an American Indian success story, and was a Democrat until a few years ago. Voters who are committed to their side will still find a reason to vote for them and to support them. Partisans will gush embarrassing nonsense about them without the least concern for being consistent with what they were saying last week.

        • Faza (TCM) says:
          March 20, 2020 at 9:13 am

          With Trump, at least, I think that whether he’s a representative of red state values is a whole lot less important than that he’s seen as someone who will fight for red state values.

          I think it isn’t too big a stretch to say that people tend to vote in their own best interest and the key issue is what they perceive to be in their best interest, rather than what we, the enlightened outsiders, do.

          It seems plausible to me that while Trump isn’t much of a paragon of politeness, civility, moderation or piety, there are other virtues that appeal to the kind of voter we assume cares about red state values, and Trump may score pretty high on some of them.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 20, 2020 at 9:16 am

            Yes. Trump does not share my values. He was, however, the only person running who didn’t hold my values in contempt.

          • albatross11 says:
            March 20, 2020 at 9:19 am

            Conrad:

            Did you think Cruz and Paul held your values in contempt? Or are you just talking about Hillary? (Who probably does hold your values in contempt….)

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 20, 2020 at 9:26 am

            Rand Paul, yes, libertarianist people are open borders, free trader types. Cruz was/is a free trader who didn’t want to build a wall until Trump got popular.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:05 am

      This doesn’t address your general point, but concretely as to President Obama:
      I think he’s a religious Rorschach blot. His father was an atheist (Marxist) of Muslim origin, and his mother then went and married a moderate actual-Muslim in Indonesia (apparently he and Barry would walk to a mosque on Fridays, but he’d still drink Friday nights). God only knows what his actual religious beliefs were when he wanted to be a “community organizer” in Chicago and it dawned on him that most African-Americans were serious Christians, which is when he joined Jeremiah Wright’s church. Technically this makes him an apostate from Islam, but did fundamentalists ever call him on that? Then Reverend Wright became a political embarrassment and he threw him under the bus, attending a DC Episcopalian church like many other Presidents. And has anyone cared to track if he’s practiced Christianity since leaving office?
      So it seems Muslims, Protestants and atheists could all see their own beliefs in him if they wanted to.

      • Nornagest says:
        March 19, 2020 at 10:36 pm

        Technically this makes him an apostate from Islam, but did fundamentalists ever call him on that?

        Forget Christian fundamentalists, did any Muslims ever call him on that? Apostasy is even more serious business in Islam than it is in Christianity.

        • albatross11 says:
          March 20, 2020 at 9:06 am

          He attended a Christian church for many years, raised his kids in the church, had them baptized in that church, etc. Nobody can look into his inner heart and know what he really believes, but that’s as strong evidence as most people can give for their beliefs. He was clearly politically ambitious, so it might have all been doing what would be best for his political prospects. Or maybe regular church attendance was important to Michelle and he went along to keep peace in the family–that’s a common pattern. Or maybe he and Michelle felt like a church was a good place to raise kids, even if they weren’t all that sure about the virgin birth or the resurrection themselves–that’s another very common pattern. Or maybe he really wanted to ground himself and his family in something more solid that pop culture, and found that at his church–another common pattern.

  10. Matt M says:
    March 18, 2020 at 10:36 am

    I suspect the SSC commentariat consist largely of white collar workers who are now safely and effectively working from home.

    How worried are you about losing your job?

    Most of my coworkers seem fairly happy that we get to work from home because we’ve been deemed “non-essential.” I, on the other hand, notice that our stock is down some 50% year over year and demand for almost all products are collapsing, and suspect that “non-essential payroll” is the easiest place to immediately reduce expenses.

    Am I freaking out over nothing? Or should I start working on the resume?

    • Secretly French says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:44 am

      I’m not worried about being sacked; we are all working from home because we’re a software house, so I don’t feel any less essential than before. Neither am I worried about getting the plague myself; my main worry is that the economy takes damage in a significant way, and it makes my life hard in many various hard-to-predict ways.

    • Bobobob says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:44 am

      As a white-collar worker who is now safely and (somewhat ineffectively) working from home, I’m not all that worried, mainly because funding for my current project is obligated for the next two and a half years. Then again, I’m not sure what “obligated” really means, since I suppose that money could be yanked from us and put somewhere else in a real fiscal emergency.

      I don’t think there’s any point in worrying, since everyone else in the world is pretty much in the same situation. I also think there will be enormous social pressure (at least in the near term, say three to six months) *not* to lay off workers in response to Coronavirus.

      • Elementaldex says:
        March 18, 2020 at 4:30 pm

        I work for a company which makes most of their money off federal contracts. We just had 100% of our funding for those contracts for next fiscal year pulled to use for coronavirus related stuff at the discretion of Health and Human Services. So… that pretty bad news for me.

    • EchoChaos says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:46 am

      How worried are you about losing your job?

      White collar, but I’m an essential manager, so I’m onsite. I am 0% worried and we’re actively hiring right now. More virtual meetings than usual, but you can already see that the people important enough to still have a few face to face conversations are rising in political power despite our lower nominal level.

      Am I freaking out over nothing? Or should I start working on the resume?

      Not nothing, but I suspect most companies really don’t want to lose talent and are hoping for Federal support for maintaining staffing levels. Working on your resume is always a good idea.

      • Matt M says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:03 am

        Perhaps my situation is somewhat unique in that our company has been struggling and was facing a lot of headwinds even prior to this situation (and this situation is making things even worse). I suspect they may have been in full “We’d probably like to start having layoffs, but don’t want to take the PR hit until we absolutely have to” mode even before this.

        And I believe this situation might grant them cover to start doing some layoffs and not take the full PR hit because “Hey, it’s the virus, it’s not their fault!” etc.

        • EchoChaos says:
          March 18, 2020 at 11:06 am

          Perhaps my situation is somewhat unique in that our company has been struggling and was facing a lot of headwinds even prior to this situation (and this situation is making things even worse).

          Yes, update your resume. Probably even start actively looking.

    • aristides says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:07 pm

      I work HR for a government run hospital. The coronavirus just increased my already substantial job security. I am much more likely to die from the coronavirus than get fired. In fact, if I’m laid off, the country is probably in apocalyptic conditions.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        March 18, 2020 at 2:30 pm

        I know someone doing backend support for hospitals (basically making sure they are following laws like HIPAA) who got furloughed because no one cares about that right now.

    • theodidactus says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:10 pm

      I was really looking forward to beginning the job hunt in early March.

    • Plumber says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:17 pm

      @Matt M, >

      “…How worried are you about losing your job?…”

      I’m blue-collar and have been deemed “essential” so I’m not worried about being layed off, I am however very worried about catching the virus and bringing it home to my wife and sons, and I’m a bit worried about being fired for lack of production in repairs of the jail, as there’s now less call for repairs downstairs, but once the virus is loose upstairs it will spread fast given how crowded it is upstairs and how resistant the inmates are to following instructions.
      So far I’ve found other tasks to keep busy with these past few days, but that can’t last and I’ll have to go upstairs, which I’ve never liked but I’m now frightened of!

    • John Schilling says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:37 pm

      Not the least bit worried, but my employer is a non-profit federally funded research and development center so that may be a special case. If as you say elsewhere your company would have been looking for excuses to lay people off anyway, sure, worry. If your company is likely to take a huge hit in gross revenues, maybe worry, but if the revenues will likely recover when the quasi-quarantine ends not so much. Or if your industry is something vital or high-visibility enough to be considered bailout-worthy.

      Blue-collar and (non-healthcare) service workers are at higher risk, IMO.

    • Jake R says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:41 pm

      My department is working in alternating shifts, a week in the plant and a week working from home. We’ve been trying to replace a bunch of retirees and almost-retirees for a while now without much success, so I’m not too worried about my job. I am a little worried about staying busy while working remotely. There’s only so much I can do from home, and I’ve already gone into the plant once this week to deal with an issue I couldn’t address or talk someone else through from home.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      March 18, 2020 at 1:14 pm

      White-collar in a factory that produces consumer products that are currently in high demand. So, not worried. The American Consumer needs to be heavily impaired before we are truly in danger of lay-offs, and if that happens, there aren’t many mitigation strategies I can take.

      I would recommend working on your resume, because your resume should be updated once a year and you should go on one interview a year, regardless of the overall economic situation or your career satisfaction.

    • Ouroborobot says:
      March 18, 2020 at 1:17 pm

      I’m a data engineer / data warehouse architect working for an insurance company whose primary business is selling medicare advantage plans among other things. Safely working from home, but the future of the business model is in doubt now more than ever so I’m probably looking to switch industries. On the plus side, I have a stellar track record. On the minus side, everything is unstable at the moment, and I expect to be potentially competing with a lot of refugees from the same space in the near future. So my worry level is currently going up.

    • anon-e-moose says:
      March 18, 2020 at 1:20 pm

      I’m a financial planner and we’re full staff in office for obvious reasons. Most of us could probably work from home with the advent of VoIP, but my performance reporting software is Windows only, and I have a mac environment at home. Plus, It’s really nice to have something to do to get out of the house. We have cancelled most in-person meetings and we sequester in private offices mostly.

      I’m not worried about losing my job, but my income is down ~15-20% this month, which isn’t great. That said, we’re in a hell of a lot better position than many. My bigger concern is health, specifically stress levels for myself and my employees. Most of our clients are taking this well, but the ones that aren’t….aren’t.

    • Brendan Richardson says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:42 pm

      Not worried at all; my company gets most of its revenue as a contractor for the railroads. If the trains stop running, I (and everyone else) will have much bigger problems than unemployment.

    • BBA says:
      March 18, 2020 at 7:00 pm

      My employer is actually doing more business than usual now, so I’m not worried about losing my job.

      Losing my sanity after a few weeks of mandatory work-from-home, on the other hand, worries me a lot.

    • Eltargrim says:
      March 18, 2020 at 9:23 pm

      Postdoc with a significant amount of direct federal funding. I have no idea; on the one hand, I’m very low on the totem pole; on the other, my grant funding was just renewed; on the gripping hand, what the feds giveth, they can taketh. I have my fingers crossed.

    • LesHapablap says:
      March 18, 2020 at 9:32 pm

      I work for a tourist flight operation in New Zealand, and we are anticipating our revenue dropping by around 90% for the next three months. Barring a miracle treatment or vaccine, make that 5 months. From there it depends how Australia, New Zealand and other countries do with their borders. If all countries stick with the suppression strategy I worry that no borders or international travel will be reliable enough for people to want to take trips overseas for the 18 months until a vaccine may be available. In which case we’ll go broke and our airplanes will become rather large paperweights.

      I might do a coding boot camp or something to have a back up. It is an impossible job market for pilots at the moment.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:
      March 19, 2020 at 10:04 am

      I am a wage (hourly) employee of a Casino. At this point I believe every state in which our company has properties has shut the casinos down, so the company has basically no revenue stream. We also just negotiated a purchase of/merger with Caesars Entertainment, which makes me suspect our liquidity is relatively low, but that’s pure speculation on my part since I am as noted waaay below that level.

      They have promised to pad our next paycheck to our average full time amount (which amounts to them paying me for 28 hours, 3.5 days not worked), but past that have only said that there are no layoffs at this time and that they will “provide timely updates regarding future pay periods.”

      My work is about 70% physical tasks on-site, about 30% office work that could theoretically be completed remotely, but almost all that office work is inextricably tied up in our day-to-day operations, and so all of that is on hold. There is literally nothing FOR me or my two fellow Marketing Coordinators to do right now, and I have asked both the Marketing Manager and Marketing Director for guidance on possible tasks and been told they don’t have anything for us, and to just wait.

      …and I’m damn glad I’m paranoid and got that in writing via e-mail, because what should happen today but a text from the manager to my coworkers and I:

      “Please send us documentation of all hours worked from home since the shut-down, including a list of all tasks/projects completed. If you want to reply to this message privately, that’s fine.”

      I was already very worried when the verbal “We will pay everyone as long as we are shut down, don’t worry” turned within a few days into a written “We will pay you for the next paycheck and will keep you updated after that”, but this reeks to me of groundwork-laying, and I am very concerned.

      Frankly, without the casino industry experience I am relegated to mostly retail/customer service/unskilled labor positions due to poor life choices made when I was younger, and only the current Amazon pay bump for warehouse workers is going to allow me to maintain anything like my current income levels, and I have concerns about my physical ability to hang in that work environment and “make rate”…

      I have rent for April, and if I can basically ignore most other bills I can cover rent for May and necessities (phone for work-related things, food) on unemployment, but I am feeling my own vulnerability very sharply right now.

  11. Le Maistre Chat says:
    March 18, 2020 at 10:55 am

    Forming crowds to vote in the midst of a pandemic.
    (New York Times, non-paywall)

    I think all 50 states need to switch to vote-by-mail. The primaries are utterly irrelevant now, but what if epidemiologists think crowds won’t be safe the first Tuesday of November?

    • Matt M says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:02 am

      I’m kind of hoping someday soon, Trump will call for all elections to be suspended in order to protect from the virus, in which case I expect to see a quick and near-total tribal switch on whether strict quarantine measures are a good idea or not.

      • Evan Þ says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:33 am

        I would consider calling for that sufficient grounds for impeachment in itself – and I opposed the last impeachment.

        • EchoChaos says:
          March 18, 2020 at 11:36 am

          100% agreed. The United States (and the Confederate States) held elections even in the Civil War.

          Cancelling them because of this would be a national disgrace.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            March 18, 2020 at 1:30 pm

            Not only did the USA and CSA hold elections during the Civil War, there’s nothing in Trump’s character to support the idea that he’s scheming for an acceptable excuse to extend his first term. He’s obsessed with being a winner, and winning a re-election vote is what a POTUS does unless they’re a loser (sad!); he’s a proud American who has a cognitive bias that constitutional = good, healthy.

      • broblawsky says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:35 am

        I think that if elections don’t happen, Nancy Pelosi automatically becomes president on January 20th at noon, unless the House selects a new Speaker between the 3rd and the 20th of January.

        • Evan Þ says:
          March 18, 2020 at 3:12 pm

          True. From Amendment 20 section 3:

          If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified…

          The Congress has so provided by the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.

          • broblawsky says:
            March 18, 2020 at 3:51 pm

            The only question is if Pelosi stays as Speaker of the House after her term as Representative expires, but AFAICT she would. If not, maybe Chuck Grassley becomes President?

        • HeelBearCub says:
          March 18, 2020 at 6:26 pm

          No, Nancy wouldn’t be in office, as her term, and all House members, and a third of the members of the Senate, would also have expired.

          Can’t find the twitter thread ATM, but I believe that Patrick
          Leahy would be the ranking majority member left.

          • Evan Þ says:
            March 18, 2020 at 11:04 pm

            But, someone can theoretically be Speaker of the House of Representatives without being a Representative herself. Does any law specifically say the Speaker’s term expires at the end of the Congress’s term?

            For another wrinkle, it’s possible House elections might be held in some states even if the Presidential election is hypothetically cancelled. So, we could see Representatives elected from only a few states, perhaps the five states with full postal voting. As long as none of them actually point out they don’t have a quorum, I believe they would be fully competent to elect a Speaker, impeach the President for trying to cancel the election, and otherwise be the House of Representatives.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            March 19, 2020 at 5:40 am

            AFAIK the speaker is the speaker for this Congress. Thus the term doesn’t extends longer than the Congressional term, so I don’t think that gets us anywhere.

            If you are entertaining the idea that “some states” might go ahead and elect House members, then “some states” might go ahead and send electors to the Electoral College, by whatever means. It’s basically refusing the hypothetical.

            If I’m refusing the hypothetical, I’m just maintaining that the states go ahead and hold their elections and say that this power is theirs. Once the first state, likely Democratic, made this decision, it would simply be a race, and eventually all of the states would do so.

            If the elections weren’t actually held, and the President was maintaining super-emergency powers to cancel elections and stay in office, it may not be wise to grant the idea that this is true for the Speaker, but somehow not the President, when you go to the Supreme Court.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:51 am

        Elections are run by the states.

      • AlexOfUrals says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:58 am

        in which case I expect to see a quick and near-total tribal switch on whether strict quarantine measures are a good idea

        Is it a tribalized issue now? I haven’t been following news lately.

        • Act_II says:
          March 18, 2020 at 12:12 pm

          There is a partisan gap in how seriously people are taking coronavirus, but the magnitude is overstated.

        • profgerm says:
          March 18, 2020 at 3:26 pm

          More so early on.

          At first there was a wave of “quarantines are racist/quarantines hurt the poor” (and apparently diseases don’t? I digress), and then when the disease actually spread in the big US cities and started affecting journalists’ skin in the game they quieted on that angle and now quarantines are mostly encouraged and non-tribal.

      • Anthony says:
        March 18, 2020 at 3:10 pm

        Is there a Federal law which requires the states to choose electors by the results of a popular vote?

        • Evan Þ says:
          March 18, 2020 at 3:14 pm

          No; just an extremely longstanding tradition. They can be chosen however the state legislature specifies.

        • mobile says:
          March 18, 2020 at 9:05 pm

          Under the 14th Amendment, states lose representation in the House of Representatives if they deny their voters the opportunity to choose electors.

          • Evan Þ says:
            March 18, 2020 at 11:06 pm

            That only refers to “any election for the choice of electors,” though – if there’s no election for electors, nobody’s been denied the right to vote in one.

            Additionally, the same section says states lose representation if they deny citizens (male, above 21 years of age, not convicted of a crime) the right to vote in elections to Congress – but that’s never been enforced.

    • Eric Rall says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:14 am

      The remaining primaries are pretty much a formality at this point for the major-party presidential tickets, but there are still contested primaries for Congressional races and for state and local offices. Vote-by-mail is probably the best solution for those, if it can be set up in time in states that don’t already have it.

      I’m also worried about the party conventions, which have several thousand delegates in the same hall, traveling from around the country. Hopefully, the party committees are able to change the rules to allow some kind of remote balloting (mail or electronic) and just do the speeches and whatnot from TV studios.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:18 am

        I’m also worried about the party conventions, which have several thousand delegates in the same hall, traveling from around the country. Hopefully, the party committees are able to change the rules to allow some kind of remote balloting (mail or electronic) and just do the speeches and whatnot from TV studios.

        Agreed.

  12. theodidactus says:
    March 18, 2020 at 11:57 am

    I realize no one knows the answer to this question, but I’m all in favor of wild speculation.

    Consider Event [x], which is large enough that many hundreds to a small number of thousands of people will attend. Event [x] is important enough that it is planned years in advance, but unimportant enough that if it were cancelled the only damage would be lost revenue and convenience. It’s not “essential.” Events that would qualify as Event [x] are large weddings, big tests like the SAT, large concerts, premiers of important movies, and important sporting events.

    When will we have Event [x] again? If Event [x] was already scheduled in for Date [Y], how far into the future does Date [Y] need to be to assume, right now, that Event [x] will be cancelled?

    • Randy M says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:48 pm

      My Grandfather’s funeral is being truncated. Only family meeting, with another memorial service planned for n undetermined date.

      edit: This doesn’t address your question. I wish I had an answer, though.

    • anon-e-moose says:
      March 18, 2020 at 1:29 pm

      I’ve heard from my wedding planner/florist friends that everything for March and April 15-30 has been cancelled and rescheduled to Oct – Nov at this point. Obviously weddings more likely to be delayed rather than cancelled, but my question is: what about the folks who reserved for November? To date, the response has been essentially “we’re not moving dates reservations in Nov to accommodate missed days in March or April,” but I wonder how sustainable that is the shutdown lasts for 30-60 days?

      For context, these are expensive, multi-hundred person events. Figure $50k low end, hundreds of thousands on the high.

      • theodidactus says:
        March 18, 2020 at 1:35 pm

        My own personal (and again, wildly speculative) attitude is basically

        – April: Everything is cancelled
        – May: Everything is cancelled
        – June: Everything is cancelled
        ===================
        Tests become widely available
        ===================
        – July: Perhaps some specially screened events
        – August: Perhaps some specially screened events
        =================================
        “We’ve successfully blunted the curve” mood sets in
        =================================
        – September: Perhaps some specially screened events
        – October: Cautious return to normal

      • Matt M says:
        March 18, 2020 at 2:29 pm

        My wedding is scheduled for April 18. So far, all of our vendors are still onboard, but that is clearly subject to change. We’re also in Texas which has not been hit particularly hard, and where “private business continues even if the government advises otherwise” is more of a thing than I imagine it might be in other locations.

        That said, our mindset is “We are getting married then no matter what, even if it has to be in our kitchen.” And we’ve told that to vendors. So if they cancel us, they aren’t getting our money some other time, they aren’t getting it at all.

        • Purplehermann says:
          March 22, 2020 at 5:13 am

          A few of my friends have gotten married since restrictions came into play, there have been amazing (and cheap) impromptu weddings that were scheduled for a later date.

          I would move up the date if possible.

    • KieferO says:
      March 18, 2020 at 1:44 pm

      Word on the street (Bill Daly interview in The Athletic) is that the NHL is willing to sacrifice what it has to in spring of 2020 so that it can play 82 games in the 2020-2021 season. I think that the NHL can’t play the games just on TV with no fans in attendance. Maybe the NBA could, but they’re not as talkative.
      I doubt that they would be willing to do this unless they thought that October was a time by which we would either be able to congregate or no longer care about the consequences. So consider this weak evidence of an upper bound.

  13. proyas says:
    March 18, 2020 at 12:28 pm

    We will be able to build the bionic suits from the movie “Edge of Tomorrow” by about 2050: https://www.militantfuturist.com/review-edge-of-tomorrow/

  14. theredsheep says:
    March 18, 2020 at 12:43 pm

    Is there an argument to be made for not flattening the curve? Suppose we have, as our two most realistic extreme options, scenario A and scenario B. In A, we do nothing, everybody acts like jackasses and holds big parties, and cases of COVID shoot through the roof. ICUs are overwhelmed by a factor of thirty (I’ve read this as a pessimistic estimate). Massive numbers of old and vulnerable people die with no hope of getting proper treatment, and the country resembles a medieval plague town. Six months later the disease has killed everyone it’s going to, and we’re left picking up the pieces. It’s ghastly.

    Scenario B, people behave as well as can reasonably be expected, curtailing most non-essential activity and staying home from work when they can, but Waffle House waitresses can’t go without work for months and UBI can’t completely substitute for a working economy. A bunch of people still die, over a longer period, and ICUs are “only” overwhelmed by a factor of five. Some extra ventilators come on line, more resources are scrambled into place, but the ICUs are overwhelmed all the same. It’s a bit less ghastly for a longer time.

    Once an ICU is past capacity, it’s past capacity. You might be able to stretch to double, even triple, normal capacity by heroic measures, but there exists a final threshold past which the system is so busted that going further changes dying in a cluttered hallway on a stretcher to dying in the lobby or dying on the street, or in your house/nursing home. Functionally, there’s little difference to what the excess patients are getting, ie not enough to live. And as long as the ICU capacity is exceeded, it’s incapable of serving other needs like surgical patients, heart attacks, non-COVID respiratory cases, etc. If we’re over the red line for months and months, all the non-COVIDs have a chance to pile up at their normal rates, or possibly accelerated rates because routine meds and supplies are back-ordered, everyone’s under prolonged stress, etc.

    At what point does the disruption to normal conditions cause more death than the disease itself? I don’t know. Flattening the curve seems to make most sense if you can keep ICUs from getting overloaded at all, but I don’t know if that’s realistically achievable. And I don’t know if all the epidemiological models can account for all the add-on effects from crossing the red line for an extended period.

    • broblawsky says:
      March 18, 2020 at 12:57 pm

      The assumption here is that the number of people infected remains constant over both scenarios. Social distancing measures can reduce the total number of infections by containing community outbreak.

      Also, assuming that the mortality rate increases to about 5% when hospital intervention is unavailable, you’re talking about killing somewhere between 2.5% and 4% of the population of the US. That’s a minimum of 8 million people. Economic conditions would have to get pretty bad for that to be reasonable.

    • The Nybbler says:
      March 18, 2020 at 1:18 pm

      There’s a report that ~80% of those on ventilators die anyway. If that’s the case (I say, putting on my Stalin mustache and Louis XIV rings), prolonging the disruption saves even fewer lives than I estimated earlier. If it weren’t for the Korean example, I’d be arguing to institute triage and otherwise just let the world burn.

      • John Schilling says:
        March 18, 2020 at 3:12 pm

        If it weren’t for the Korean example, I’d be arguing to institute triage and otherwise just let the world burn.

        Yes. Assuming the total number of cases is fixed, with a 1-(1/R0) infection fraction before herd immunity stops the spread and absolutely nothing we can do about it, then the value of “flattening the curve” is small and my guess is that getting it over with causes the least overall harm. Graphs where someone shows a flattened curve and then draws in a line for “health care system capacity” at just above the flattened-curve peak are basically a fantasy; that line should be blatantly hand-drawn with a sharpie for honesty, because on any realistic scale the ICU-bed line or whatever is basically the X axis.

        But there’s no strong reason to believe that’s the best we can do, and the South Korean example looks like an existence proof that we can do much, much better. If current trends continue, the coronavirus will be effectively extinct in the ROK in about two months, and the total number of infections will be <10,000 for the whole country. If there's some argument that their current decaying exponential somehow has to reverse to an increasing exponential until half the country is infected, I haven't seen it. If there's some argument that every other developed country can't do proportionately the same thing that the ROK is doing, I haven't seen that either. So I'd like to see us try.

        • salvorhardin says:
          March 18, 2020 at 6:34 pm

          Trying the SK strategy (or the Vo strategy variant) requires, AIUI, that we get enough testing capacity online to test absolutely everyone with symptoms plus at least a substantial fraction/baseline sample of those without.

          So any severe population restrictions, then, can only be justified as buying time until that capacity is in place. Given the institutions we have and not those we’d wish to have, how long can we expect that to take, and how does that compare to the time for which “shelter in place” is realistically sustainable? Honest question; I don’t have the answer and haven’t seen where people are working on getting it.

          • Chalid says:
            March 18, 2020 at 6:41 pm

            I’d also speculate that the SK strategy only works if your infected population fraction is not too large, otherwise the contact tracing problem will become impossible. So, I would guess, severe restrictions now improve the chances of the SK strategy later.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            March 18, 2020 at 6:55 pm

            FUD about testing is the worst part for me. Any day, I could come down with a sore throat and cough: I’m in my 30s, married, and we can get paid sick leave if one of us gets tested positive, but what if I can’t?
            It seems 92% of infections are “mild”, and of the 8% serious, we’re being warned by places like France that “half are under 60!” — well OK, but that’s 4% of total infections and half that could be 50-59 year-olds while another quarter is 40-49 year-olds. So I’m 99% positive for each of us that we’d get through an infection with “mild” symptoms and someone to give us food, water, and electrolytes if it feels like a “can’t get out of bed” flu, but without testing that could leave whoever gets sick first taking unpaid leave in an atmosphere of FUD.
            So I just want South Korea-scale testing and I’ll feel fine.

        • LesHapablap says:
          March 18, 2020 at 9:17 pm

          The now oft-cited imperial study imperial study assumes that permanent eradication is impossible, and that once the measures are lifted you’ll have a month or two until infections rise again.

          Is this a valid assumption?

          EDIT: Also, the study specifically does not take into account economic damage when it recommends suppression. Are there any studies that look into the effects of these big hits to GDP?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            March 18, 2020 at 9:38 pm

            We show that in the UK and US context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures, though it should be recognised that such closures may have negative impacts on health systems due to increased absenteeism. The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed.

            Holy cow. If this turns into expert consensus, no one is going to listen to them. If everything can’t safely return to normal some time in May, people under 40 will want a Logan’s Run world.

          • Creutzer says:
            March 19, 2020 at 12:43 am

            The Imperial College study makes no attempt to actually validate its model. It also assumes that measures start only mid-April (giving you a much higher number of infections to start with), and that they are relaxed periodically so as to give the disease time to spread again.

            That study’s main purpose was to scare the living daylights out of everyone and get the UK government off its “let it burnt through” course.

            I’m not taking it seriously as a prediction because it basically says Korea, Taiwan and Singapore can’t happen. And possibly mainland China – I’m curious to see how they will do, but it seems very possible that they’ll continue with eradication.

            So I’m not happy about the study at all, because while it motivates taking measures, it actually discourages people, without argument of any form, from pursuing the goal that’s worth pursuing: suppression followed by very OCD testing and contact tracing to the point of actual eradication.

          • eric23 says:
            March 19, 2020 at 2:17 am

            ^ Exactly. Every East Asian country has achieved containment.

            Right now they are worrying about a “second wave” from citizens returning from abroad because things are so much better at home. But they know exactly who to watch for this “second wave” (a relatively small number of travelers) and once they have returned there will be no “third wave”.

            We are destined for a world divided between competent countries with no coronavirus, and incompetent countries with possibly pervasive coronavirus, with no travel between the two.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 19, 2020 at 4:48 am

            The now oft-cited imperial study imperial study assumes that permanent eradication is impossible … Is this a valid assumption?

            It’s not a valid assumption. It is something a useful study might try to prove or disprove, but if I see someone claiming it as an assumption then I’m guessing they decided on the conclusions first and did the study afterwards.

          • LesHapablap says:
            March 19, 2020 at 11:20 am

            If the report was written to stop the ‘let it burn’ strategy, and that is the conclusion it reaches, why does it assume that suppression can’t work without isolation measures having to be brought back forever? That fights against their conclusion. Reading that study, the mitigation strategy seems best, despite the increase in deaths, because it is all over and done after 5 months.

            I reckon that politicians read that study, saw that hospitals would be overrun by any mitigation strategy, and correctly foresee that re-election is impossible if hospitals get overrun. From the bad optics alone.

          • LesHapablap says:
            March 19, 2020 at 11:23 am

            Is there any other studies I should be reading up on? I am planning things out around our business at the moment and the better forecast I have the more chance we will still be around in two years.

          • Creutzer says:
            March 21, 2020 at 3:27 am

            If the report was written to stop the ‘let it burn’ strategy, and that is the conclusion it reaches, why does it assume that suppression can’t work without isolation measures having to be brought back forever? That fights against their conclusion.

            I agree there is a certain amount of incoherence there and I’m puzzled by it myself. My only explanation is that it was meant to work by immediate shock value (which it did), as opposed to an argument that was thought through from beginning to end.

            Is there any other studies I should be reading up on?

            I don’t know of any. A lot of the uncertainty at this point is really in the politics, you can’t predict that with a model.

    • zoozoc says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:20 am

      You are missing scenario C and D.

      C: extreme shutdown over 1-2 months causes cases to drop very low (much like China). Shutdown is relaxed and after a month, US is in the same situation as it is in currently. Repeat this process however-many times it takes until a vaccine is found OR a much better treatment.

      D: Same as C, but extreme shutdown never stops. Have to do this for potentially 18 months until vaccine arrives. No coronavirus, but no economy either.

      • Mark V Anderson says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:26 pm

        C: extreme shutdown over 1-2 months causes cases to drop very low (much like China). Shutdown is relaxed and after a month, US is in the same situation as it is in currently. Repeat this process however-many times it takes until a vaccine is found OR a much better treatment.

        Yes, I think this is by far the best option. It may be that we will all get used keeping a safe distance and constantly washing hands for the next couple of years, and perhaps also periodic clampdowns if cases drift upward again. That sounds much better, and less deadly, than all the other options.

    • Kaitian says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:26 pm

      I have to imagine the unsaid part of “flattening the curve” is that it buys us time to expand ICUs, find more effective treatments and medications, and maybe wait for a vaccine. But even if it’s not, having the health system a bit overwhelmed for a longer time must be better than having it completely overwhelmed for a shorter time. Surely it’s better if you have to send away the 10% most hopeless cases, than if you can only treat the 10% most treatable cases, because those who would be at about 50% hopeless will die in the one case and survive in the other.

      The other unsaid part is that transmission is expected to go down a bit in warmer temperatures, so we might be able to go back to less extreme measures by then.

      I don’t have the knowledge to assess the economic impact of each scenario. But apparently recessions don’t kill people (source), so the flatter curve seems preferable at least from a public health perspective.

  15. Forward Synthesis says:
    March 18, 2020 at 12:44 pm

    I remember suggesting a radical proposal to transfer the ownership title of rented accommodations to their occupiers. The debate that ensued convinced me that there was no way to do it without destroying the economy, buuut…

    …now we’re seriously talking about freezing evictions indefinitely, doesn’t it have new legs? The government could be paying off landlords for up to a year, so at some point in that process that’s a form of compensation that would ease the transfer. Due to the crisis we’re putting government in the position to reconfigure a lot more of the economy, which is almost certainly set to enter a big recession soon whatever we do. My ideological justification for this is not out of an opposition to the institution of property in general, but out of the desire to see some sort of property baseline. Food has long since ceased being an issue for most of the poorest, but the rent (and mortgage payments) remains too damn high. It’s not a great thing to have a system that exalts property in which house prices are propped up so much by the government that new buyers can’t get on the ladder. An entire class of people without landed property is a bad thing, because without that you are liable to be turfed out into the street to lose everything else.

    The banks, the government, and property owners form a symbiosis circle in which they prop each other up, so even measures meant to make housing cheaper can harm the economy due to the sheer investment in housing. Now everything is going to be held up by the government for quite some time, and some significant economic disarray seems inevitable. This seems as opportune a time as possible to put Resetism into action, at least on housing, if not other property inequalities under capitalism. If there is an increasing lack of ownership stake in society by the young you will see economic destruction as government flounders about trying to treat the symptoms instead of the cause, putting in place distortions of mortgage value that lead to events like the 2008 financial crisis. Here we are already getting ready with massive bail-outs of everything, so the government is effectively going to be paying for people’s rent and covering mortgages anyway. Now is the time.

    Ordinarily we could say that the economic disruption would be too much, but the government is covering for it already. Ordinarily we could say that this would incentivize further state power, but it’s being incentivized to the nth degree because of this crisis. The important thing now is how that power is utilized, and if it’s utilized correctly it can benefit the poor in many countries well beyond the end of this crisis.

    • eyeballfrog says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:17 pm

      How would that work with apartment buildings? Do they become condominiums?

    • Forward Synthesis says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:26 pm

      @eyeballfrog
      There would have to be some portion of co-operative management/ownership mixed in with owning the individual flats.

    • Alexander Turok says:
      March 18, 2020 at 5:01 pm

      Food has long since ceased being an issue for most of the poorest, but the rent (and mortgage payments) remains too damn high.

      In other words, property as a proportion of total spending is in that goldilocks zone where it’s widely affordable but not easily affordable.

      It’s not a great thing to have a system that exalts property in which house prices are propped up so much by the government that new buyers can’t get on the ladder

      If policy X is an injustice, the solution is to stop doing it.

      The banks, the government, and property owners form a symbiosis circle in which they prop each other up, so even measures meant to make housing cheaper can harm the economy due to the sheer investment in housing.

      Focus on production. Does it harm productivity? If the answer is no, then it doesn’t harm the economy.

      If there is an increasing lack of ownership stake in society by the young you will see economic destruction as government flounders about trying to treat the symptoms instead of the cause, putting in place distortions of mortgage value that lead to events like the 2008 financial crisis.

      I don’t see any logical connection between those two things. You say it’s important to get people owning houses and you point to others who said the same thing and screwed the economy up as an argument. How about just say no? People don’t need to own property to own equity. If they think so, they’re wrong.

      Here we are already getting ready with massive bail-outs of everything, so the government is effectively going to be paying for people’s rent and covering mortgages anyway. Now is the time.

      Now is the time to stop that bailout. You’re going to hear this kind of rhetoric for years. “We” did this “corporate welfare” and so we can afford _.” I didn’t do it. I wrote an angry paragraph to my congressman telling him not to. And if he votes for it, I won’t vote for him.

    • Erusian says:
      March 18, 2020 at 9:39 pm

      The issue is you’re off by orders of magnitude. The current most generous proposal by the government is $6,000 to each individual adult and $1,000 per child. Let’s just say $6,000 per person: that’s about $2 trillion. Additionally, they Fed created $1.5 trillion through monetary policy (which does not mean they gave anyone actual money: it’s to allow an expansion of credit). And there’ve been a spate of other measures, which we can very generously call another .5 trillion. That’s a total of $4 trillion, and even then that’s a highly deceptive number because almost half of it isn’t a bailout or grant or anything.

      Obama’s bailout of the auto industry was about $150 billion. Let’s say this is ten times worse over the next year or two. That’s another $1.5 trillion. So even with these insanely generous, basically deceptive standards for what the government will do we’re at $5.5 trillion. And keep in mind, this is based on the most generous proposal. In reality, the government has spent much, much less.

      As it stands, the Trump administration has only asked for $1-2 billion. And they haven’t even reached a hundred million spent yet. That number might inflate if bailout schemes or assistance schemes pass, but we’re still talking about, at best, a few trillion. And I doubt it will get there.

      How much would it cost to buy all mortgage debt and residential rental property in the country? Well, first, let’s note the fact that the people most likely to own their own homes are also the most vulnerable. So we’d be giving benefits disproportionately to the least affected and alleviate those we need to stay home the least. But on to the actual numbers: total mortgage debt in the US is about $16 trillion. Rent is estimate at about half a trillion a year. Presuming the average rental property is worth roughly nine times the rent (the 1% rule), you get about $4.5 trillion. So, presuming you can get exactly face value (which is generous), it’d cost about $20.5 trillion to compensate landlords and lenders for the cost of the titles. It would instantly double the US debt.

      Of course, you could seize them, but the sectors would never sustain a twenty trillion plus loss. It’d also be illegal.

      So, basically, the US has increased its spending by .1% and you’re arguing that this increase in spending is similar to a scheme that would increase US government spending by 600%. One which would target specifically young and healthy people in response to a virus that kills primarily the old, who are likely to already own homes. It seems like you have a destination you want to get to (a mass give away of property to the young) and you’re massively bending things to get there.

      If you want cheaper real estate prices, leave the major cities. That’s pretty much the only place where the pattern you describe occurs. I know plenty of people who bought homes in their early twenties on working class incomes. But they weren’t in expensive areas. They still have jobs despite all the jobs supposedly being in cities. If you’re interested in more systemic change, simplify zoning and make it easier to build. Increasing supply is the only way to decrease price in the long run. Almost anything other than increasing supply faster than demand ultimately leads to an increase in price.

      Seriously, the US has about 400 cities in it. Jacksonville (which is #40 by metropolitan area population, and so the bottom of the top 10%) is very affordable. A $60,000 household income with 20% downpayment and 30% of your income going to mortgage (which is about average) gets you a free standing house with a yard, 2,000-3,000 square feet, and 2-3 bathrooms and a similar number of bedrooms. And it gets more affordable further down the list.

    • eric23 says:
      March 19, 2020 at 2:12 am

      Transferring massive amounts of wealth from owners (whom you wrongly assume to be all rich) to renters (whom you wrongly assume to be all poor) would not solve the problem. All it would do is create a different set of owners of the same limited supply of housing. Anyone who wanted to rent an apartment at any point in the future would have to pay equally high rents. Actually they would have to pay even higher rents, to price in the risk that ownership would be forcibly transferred like it was once before. So your proposal would actually make the problem worse, not better.

      There is a different solution though. Rent is cheap outside big cities. Rent is expensive in big cities only because supply is artificially limited. Get rid of zoning restrictions which limit supply, and rent will quickly become much more affordable. The economy will grow, both because of the new demand for construction labor, and because economic productivity is higher in large cities and more people will be able to afford to live there.

    • Garrett says:
      March 19, 2020 at 6:19 am

      This also creates a moral hazard for everybody else. I bought my own house and paid it off in a timely manner (years ago) because I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be in this exact situation. So now others are effectively being rewarded for failing to take such actions themselves. I’m being doubly screwed-over because I’ll end up footing the bill for the ownership transfers, too.

    • Forward Synthesis says:
      March 19, 2020 at 7:01 am

      @Erusian

      How much would it cost to buy all mortgage debt and residential rental property in the country? Well, first, let’s note the fact that the people most likely to own their own homes are also the most vulnerable. So we’d be giving benefits disproportionately to the least affected and alleviate those we need to stay home the least. But on to the actual numbers: total mortgage debt in the US is about $16 trillion. Rent is estimate at about half a trillion a year. Presuming the average rental property is worth roughly nine times the rent (the 1% rule), you get about $4.5 trillion. So, presuming you can get exactly face value (which is generous), it’d cost about $20.5 trillion to compensate landlords and lenders for the cost of the titles. It would instantly double the US debt.

      Of course, you could seize them, but the sectors would never sustain a twenty trillion plus loss. It’d also be illegal.

      Does instantly doubling the US debt even matter at this point? We’ve established experimentally that governments can take on way more debt than anyone previously thought and that the government can just inflate and inflate it so long as it is able to pay the interest on the debt.

      Also, an important thing: if landlords/housing associations/etc are staying solvent from rents in a year (which the government must be paying anyway with the freeze evictions plan we’re already doing), and you say the full market value should be 9 times as much, then you can tell them to wait 9 years for the full value of compensation, and they immediately recieve 1/9th of that for the first year. Therefore it’s more like doubling the US debt over 9 years. Keep in mind Bernie’s Green New Deal that is also being taken seriously by other left wing Dems like AOC was billed at $16 trillion, so we’re talking about nearly the same ballpark of number added to other stuff.

      • John Schilling says:
        March 19, 2020 at 7:09 am

        Does instantly doubling the US debt even matter at this point? We’ve established experimentally that governments can take on way more debt than anyone previously thought

        We have not established that governments can take on infinite debt, and it is implausible that they could. Doubling the US debt, at minimum cuts into our margin for dealing with future crises and sticks us with a massive ongoing expense even in non-crisis times unless and until we ask some future generation to make a sacrifice roughly equivalent to the one we’re buying our way out of now. And it risks finding out that, oops, the limit on how much debt the US government can take on was somewhere between 100% and 200% of the present value. In which case we get the fiscal apocalypse in the middle of a plague.

        Folks, “Mad Max” was not a utopian tale.

        • EchoChaos says:
          March 19, 2020 at 7:21 am

          Folks, “Mad Max” was not a utopian tale.

          Hot take alert.

          • BBA says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:29 pm

            A world with flamethrower guitars can’t be all bad.

          • toastengineer says:
            March 19, 2020 at 11:55 pm

            Yes, but you can have flamethrower guitars AND civilization.

          • Garrett says:
            March 20, 2020 at 5:59 am

            > Yes, but you can have flamethrower guitars AND civilization.

            Not in California or Maryland. And that assumes you count them as civilized.

          • EchoChaos says:
            March 20, 2020 at 6:08 am

            @toastengineer

            Technically, I suppose, but is it a real flamethrower guitar if you are using it in accordance with rules?

        • Forward Synthesis says:
          March 19, 2020 at 8:23 am

          If the limit on debt is somewhere between 100% and 200% then it won’t be long even without this proposal. The debt doubled between 2014 and just before the financial crisis. In 2017, the CBO projected that the debt would double again within 30 years. Considering that they were operating outside of a crisis that requires war mobilization levels of deficit spending, I think they were being optimistic.

          Point being: if 100-200% is the limit, then we are reaching it in the relative near term anyway. Maybe you think that about yesterday was the time that we needed to engage in massive and brutal levels of austerity, but that wasn’t politically viable yesterday, and it certainly isn’t viable today.

          Of course ballooning debt has an end point, but the US is just going to have to reach the endpoint of that process. If 100-200% is the bankruptcy point of the government, then in all likelihood the government is going to reach that point, because massive opposition from the Tea Party and conservatives talking small government for years did nothing, because when the rubber hit the road, their constituents didn’t want small government; they wanted colossal government.

          I linked my policy proposal to the idea of evictions being suspended for a year, because if they have to be suspended for that long, it will be because that’s how long fairly substantive lockdowns last. If we do indeed go that long, then the economy is going to be screwed, and the major issue with the debt crisis sideshow will be who we decide to help with the printer press we’re running into the ground anyway.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 19, 2020 at 9:00 am

            Of course ballooning debt has an end point, but the US is just going to have to reach the endpoint of that process.

            First, that’s not absolutely inevitable. And second, of all the times to reach the endpoint of this process, the middle of a pandemic is about the second worst.

            It took a lot of stupid decisions to get us to the point of having to wonder if we maybe have to not give people the economic help they need in the middle of this crisis, but we made those decisions and now I’m wondering. No, it’s not going to change anything. But neither will not wondering, or only silently wondering.

      • Erusian says:
        March 19, 2020 at 11:16 am

        I’m going to say something that seems mean but I’m honestly trying to give you some good advice: Go take some economics, finance, and business courses. The ignorance of economics in these statements is so large that everything, from its fundamental premises, to its thought processes, to its conclusions, are not even wrong. They do not rise to the level of being incorrect.

        You obviously care about these issues. And that’s good. Really, most people don’t care as much as you do. But you should learn some more about them before you go writing policy prescriptions.

        Now then:

        Does instantly doubling the US debt even matter at this point? We’ve established experimentally that governments can take on way more debt than anyone previously thought and that the government can just inflate and inflate it so long as it is able to pay the interest on the debt.

        This attitude towards debt is not shared by any mainstream economist. It seems to have more in common with the thoroughly discredited and never really taken seriously MMT school, which is not endorsed even by very far left wing economists.

        if landlords/housing associations/etc are staying solvent from rents in a year (which the government must be paying anyway with the freeze evictions plan we’re already doing), and you say the full market value should be 9 times as much, then you can tell them to wait 9 years for the full value of compensation, and they immediately recieve 1/9th of that for the first year.

        Firstly, we’re not freezing evictions some other countries are. Secondly, freezing evictions doesn’t abridge the landlord’s right to the money or ownership rights. Thirdly, it’s being backed up by the government compensating them. So effectively, those countries are collectively paying for that out of tax revenue. Which is fine on humanitarian grounds but is a far cry from this massive intervention you want.

        I have no idea how you got the idea that getting a 12% return means you can force people to wait nine years to get the full value. Firstly, it completely ignores the time value of money: they have an asset worth multiple times its return now. So forcing them to trade it for just its returns over the next nine years is still a net loss. And that doesn’t even get to the fact that real estate is usually an appreciating asset!

        You’re effectively forcing a multi-trillion dollar loan from the sector and then expecting them to remain in business for the next nine years while foregoing the profits they expected to receive. This would still destroy it and I can almost guarantee they would not cooperate.

        Keep in mind Bernie’s Green New Deal that is also being taken seriously by other left wing Dems like AOC was billed at $16 trillion, so we’re talking about nearly the same ballpark of number added to other stuff.

        Yes, and even Democrats have been pointing out the numbers make sense. Even John Oliver has to admit the numbers are, at best, dubious, and John Oliver is as progressive-partisan as the day is long. Moreover, it’s $16 trillion over the next ten years. Which means it’s still much, much, much less than your plan. Unless you’re also planning to stagger over the next ten years? In which case how is it a response to coronavirus?

        Indeed, the entire underlying thought here seems to be, “There’s a crisis, let’s push for the thing I wanted anyway because… it might help I guess?” There are responses that would help and even some reforms that I think might be good. But this is simply not one of them.

        • Theodoric says:
          March 19, 2020 at 11:46 am

          Firstly, we’re not freezing evictions some other countries are.

          Nitpick: Some states are freezing evictions. For example, in New York “residential evictions, court-ordered auctions, and residential foreclosure proceedings have been suspended.” (memo issued by the court system).

        • Forward Synthesis says:
          March 19, 2020 at 12:33 pm

          I’m going to say something that seems mean but I’m honestly trying to give you some good advice: Go take some economics, finance, and business courses. The ignorance of economics in these statements is so large that everything, from its fundamental premises, to its thought processes, to its conclusions, are not even wrong. They do not rise to the level of being incorrect.

          I’ve never done a university degree in economics. I have at least the high school level knowledge as I got an A in that subject in my college in Britain.

          This attitude towards debt is not shared by any mainstream economist. It seems to have more in common with the thoroughly discredited and never really taken seriously MMT school, which is not endorsed even by very far left wing economists.

          MMT? When I look them up, the Wikipedia page assesses their main disagreement with mainstream economics being the impact of government bonds on interest rates. However, MMT’s other four tenets are claimed to be inside the mainstream . We also get a quote from Alan Greenspan (you don’t get more mainstream than a former Fed chair): “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.” The issue would actually be inflation.

          I’m familiar with Keynesian economics and MMT seems to be mostly just be Keynesian economics with a leftist “and therefore we should…” added.

          I have no idea how you got the idea that getting a 12% return means you can force people to wait nine years to get the full value. Firstly, it completely ignores the time value of money: they have an asset worth multiple times its return now. So forcing them to trade it for just its returns over the next nine years is still a net loss. And that doesn’t even get to the fact that real estate is usually an appreciating asset!

          But that 12% is directly equal (by your numbers) to the amount landlords already extract in rent so it should be enough to keep them afloat. The value of the asset doesn’t become usable unless they sell it. Whether they get compensation exactly equal to what they would get after 9 years including the hypothetical appreciation of the market price doesn’t matter functionally. What matters functionally is whether they get enough to not collapse. It’s inherently enough to prevent them from going bankrupt, otherwise what they are charging wouldn’t be sufficient to begin with.

          Moreover, it’s $16 trillion over the next ten years. Which means it’s still much, much, much less than your plan. Unless you’re also planning to stagger over the next ten years? In which case how is it a response to coronavirus?

          Yes, $16.3 trillion over ten years is less than $20.5 trillion over 9 years, but if the latter is the debt load that collapses the republic, the former wouldn’t put you far off in terms of years of wiggle room.

          The response to coronavirus is the part where you pay people’s rent (part compensation for the owners), and then the part where you use the “war mobilization” efforts to transfer ownership is the part where you rectify something I believe is inherently wrong. One is facilitated by the other. I don’t think we should do this unless the crisis lasts at least a year, but at that point landlords would be fully dependent on government in order to survive anyway.

          • Aapje says:
            March 20, 2020 at 8:28 am

            “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.” The issue would actually be inflation.

            Which would destroy the dollar as an internationally valuable currency. So the result would be that any new trade & debt would be based on the euro, yen, yuan, etc, which would expose the US to a lot of volatility and risk. Inflating the dollar away would destroy the reputation of the US as a good borrower, causing high interest payments.

            Having the dollar lose its status as the main reserve currency would cost the US a lot of money, including by having to pay more in interest.

            Alan Greenspan is an ignorant fool, BTW, who believes in efficient market theories that are false.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 20, 2020 at 10:42 am

            Inflating the dollar away would destroy the reputation of the US as a good borrower, causing high interest payments.

            Which will henceforth be payable in euros, yen, yuan, etc, because nobody will buy Treasuries denominated in dollars in that hypothetical.

            You get to play that trick once, and you pay for it for a generation. Or more.

    • Mark V Anderson says:
      March 19, 2020 at 6:17 pm

      Over the years I’ve become more convinced that far too many individuals have ownership in their homes. A much more renter based society would improve the flexibility and quality of most people’s lives.

      Giving poor people housing is a very inefficient way to solve poverty. Food and clothing is much less an issue for poverty than it was 100 years ago. We didn’t solve the food and clothing problems by giving everyone the means to create their own food and clothing. We did the opposite — by mass producing food and clothing so it became affordable for almost everyone to get as much as they want.

      Of course I don’t think we can mass produce housing the same way. Housing requires land to sit on. Land is inherently expensive in cities where most people live, and we can’t create more (although we can build higher to give ourselves more square footage). Also, utilities such as electric and plumbing have to be hooked up to the land they occupy, so mass production can go only so far with housing.

      But at least in the US, consumption and laws are making it more difficult for housing to be provided for everyone. One could arguably say that mass produced food has gotten cheaper but has also gone down in quality, as all the chemicals added that prevent spoilage and help in production may be bad for folks. So the downside of increased food is lower quality food. But I’d say preventing starvation is worth the trade-off. But in housing quality has gotten higher, which is also making it more expensive. People live in bigger homes, and building codes become more strict all the time. I suspect that we’ve increased the quality beyond the ability of society to afford it for everyone.

      The last couple of paragraphs were kind of a segue to explain my hypothesis as to why housing has become more comparatively expensive and thus unaffordable to many of the poor. Giving the poor housing won’t solve the problem; it will just make housing that much more inflexible. When you own a home, it is a lot more difficult to move to a better place to get a job. People’s housing needs also constantly change, such as one gets married or divorced, has children or children leave, or the owner dies. So getting a house is at most a short term solution. The better way to make sure everyone has housing is to stop increasing the quality of housing beyond the ability of all to pay. Zoning laws that require a certain square footage per person, disallow shared housing in many cases between unrelated people, or don’t allow folks to rent out an extra bedroom all decrease the level of housing available and jack up the price. That’s what we need to fix.

  16. oriscratch says:
    March 18, 2020 at 12:56 pm

    Suggestion: maybe people who are posting about non-coronavirus stuff can stick a special string in their comment (like !corona) so that people looking for non-coronavirus stuff in the open threads can just Ctrl+f for those?

    • 10240 says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:43 pm

      It should be something else, as !corona sends a false signal to those of us who use eyegrep.

    • johan_larson says:
      March 19, 2020 at 4:19 am

      I suggest we split the discussion. Use the Wednesday threads to talk about the pandemic; use the Sunday threads for everything else.

      • acymetric says:
        March 19, 2020 at 12:27 pm

        I dunno, I think things get too cluttered keeping all the coronavirus stuff in one thread for a full week.

        What about making the whole number OTs both CW and CV free, maybe with a partner “Coronavirus” thread alongside the even numbered OT for the most current discussion (the recent “Coronavirus links” thread could serve that purpose for the upcoming whole-numbered thread.

        I do think it would do some good to have an OT where coronavirus discussion was tabled (with the exception of things like “I’m bored because I’m stuck at home due to coronavirus, what time wasting MMORPG should I start playing?” type posts that aren’t really about the virus, it’s impact/spread, or the political aspects).

  17. Canyon Fern says:
    March 18, 2020 at 12:59 pm

    Presenting: Slate Star Showdex, Act 2, Episode 2.
    -#-#-
    “Let’s get something straight, Navy Suit.”

    Dr. Scott “Slate” Alexander and his prisoner of war are in the doctor-investigator’s drawing room. The former is standing erect, massaging the knuckles of his right hand.

    The latter is kneeling, bleeding from the mouth.

    “I saved your life. It’s time to return the favor. If you don’t tell me where Hiss is building his weapon, I’ll bring you along to see the lizardmen. When we get there, I’ll explain your role in Hiss’s crimes … and I’ll let them deal with you.”

    Navy Suit’s eyes widen in horror. He shakes his head frantically, but remains silent.

    “Last chance, Navy Suit.” Scott leans in close, bringing his face inches away from Navy Suit’s trembling nose. “You know, I haven’t had a MealSquare in over twenty-four hours.”

    Just as Navy Suit opens his mouth to speak, there comes a knock at the front door. Scott orders Navy Suit onto the couch, as if he were a private patient, and then goes to see who it is.

    “Dr. Alexander! I’m Willy Won’t-He.” The slim but chubby-cheeked man sports a toothy grin and an impossibly-cheap brown suit. He carries a bulging briefcase. “Tremendous Value sends his regards.”

    “You must be Mr. Value’s enforcer,” Scott says. “Come on in. I understand you have something for me.”

    Willy Won’t-He crosses the threshold, and whistles. “Nice place, sir! All that doctoring does a wallet good, huh?” He catches sight of Navy Suit. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

    “We’re just finishing up some physical therapy.”

    Willy, as sharp as his suit is shabby, tips Scott a wink. “Physical therapy! That’s a good one, sir, I’ll remember that.” He sets the briefcase on an end table, clicks open the catches, and waves Scott forward. “OK, business time. This briefcase and its contents are rightfully yours. Have a peek!”

    Scott peers into the briefcase. It’s a cash cornucopia.

    “I haven’t seen this much gold in one place since the Hotel El Dorado,” Scott says. “Willy, your boss is a generous man.”

    “Think nothing of it, sir,” Willy says, his grin stretching even wider. “When compared to the boss’s life, what’s a little gold?”

    Scott stares pensively into the case. “Willy,” the doctor-investigator says, “something’s happened to MealSquares. Every store is sold out, nobody knows where to get more, and when my secretary telephoned the factory directly, the operator said the line had been disconnected.”

    The enforcer whistles again. “Is that so?”

    The Man of Slate drops his artificial composure. “You see this pile of gold? I’d trade the stack for half a pack!” He scoops up a double handful of gold coins, and drips them out between his fingers. One by one, they fall back into the case.

    “I can make you a rich man, Willy. I just need two things. Number one: I need answers from the clown on the couch. Number two: I need enough MealSquares to finish the job that will avenge your boss.”

    Willy’s mouth goes from puckish to puckered. “I can handle answers, sir, but if the MealSquare supply is as short as you say, they’re not likely to turn up on the black market: everyone will be hoarding them. I have a single pack left myself; perhaps you know a chemist who could study them, and cook up the formula?”

    Scott’s eyes glitter. “That’s swell, Willy. Open your hand.” When Willy complies, Scott grabs a fistful of coins, and slaps them into the other man’s palm. “Those are for you.” He grabs another fistful and shoves them into his coat pocket. “These are for me.” Finally, he closes the case and hands it to Willy. “And this is for Mr. Yudkowsky, at General Intelligence. Tell him Dr. Alexander wants someone on the problem.”

    “You have my word, sir — but it’ll be ages until the scientists succeed!”

    “It will. I’ll just have to tough it out.” Scott grimaces. “Now, you said you could get me answers–”

    Willy’s already standing over Navy Suit. Before Scott can blink, there’s a squish. Navy Suit screams in agony.

    “Canada! He’s in Canada!”
    -#-#-
    Fwoooooooooon.

    “Alllll aboard!”

    From his compartment in the Southern Pacific passenger car, Scott Alexander hears the conductor make the last call for the 3:15 to Santa Cruz.

    Chugga-chugga-chugga. The train begins to move. The private compartment is safe and sound. Dr. Alexander reclines in a stupendously soft leather chair.

    I’ve got to to get one of these for the office.

    There’s a knock on the compartment door. “Beverage service!”

    “No, thank you,” Scott calls out.

    “Are you sure?” says the voice on the other side of the door. “The map that led me to this mineral water matched the territory exactly!”

    Scott perks up. “Come in.”

    The door slides open. A redheaded man, middle-aged but strong of build, enters the room with a bottle. He’s wearing an attendant’s uniform: a puffy white shirt with ruffles, black pants, and black shoes. The man nods in greeting, takes a big step into the room, shuts the door, and stands at attention.

    “Dr. Alexander, pleased to meet you. Tremendous Value is an old friend, and he suggested I offer you my services. My name is Eric. I can wrestle and karate-chop with the best of them, and drop a man at 40 yards with one shot.”

    “I’m impressive,” Scott says. “I mean, I’m impressed.”

    “Hold your horses, Doctor: that’s only half the equation.” Eric winks. “Let me show you my real power.” Eric kneels on his left knee, sticks his right leg straight out, and crosses his arms over his neck. He splays his fingers, then makes them into claws.

    “『SNAKEY NO STEPPY』”

    Before, there was Eric. Now, there is Eric — and, in loose coils around him, an enormous translucent rattlesnake. It’s twelve feet long, and as wide as a horse.

    “Whoa,” Scott says.

    “Snake,” Scott adds.

    The rattlesnake rattles.

    “Not bad, huh?” Eric tosses his head, and the snake fades from view. “Kung fu isn’t just about combat. Kung fu, at its core, is about channeling your spirit.”

    “Channeling your spirit … into a ghost snake?” Scott says. So much for taking down Hiss the old-fashioned way. Who needs a gun with this guy around?

    “Not everyone gets a snake, or even an animal,” Eric says solemnly. “One of my fellow disciples at Mount Nozick can smell changes in the stock market.” He stands up and clears his throat. “Now, I’m ready and willing to help you take the fight to — whoever, really.”

    Oh, yeah.

    “However, I only accept two kinds of payment: redheads, and gold.”

    Oh, no.

    “I … I’m afraid I’m all out of redheads,” Scott says. “As for gold, well…” He reaches into his jacket pocket, and shows Eric the fistful of coins.

    Eric slaps his knee and comes closer to inspect the gold. “The good news, Dr. Alexander, is that we can come to an arrangement; the bad news is that this isn’t enough for my personal services.” He rubs his stubble, then grins. “I see you carry a revolver.”

    Dr. Alexander’s revolver is tucked in his waistband, hidden by his shirt and coat as always. The fearless doctor-investigator raises an eyebrow.

    “Tell you what, doc. Tremendous Value spoke highly of you, so the least I can do is bring you into the 20th century.” As he walks up to Scott’s comfy chair, Eric reaches behind his back and produces a Colt M1911.

    “Take my gun. Hell, take the whole kit.” After trading his pistol for the gold, Eric takes off his ruffled shirt to reveal a webbed vest festooned with accessories and ammunition. He removes the vest and gently places it on Scott’s lap. “Can you figure everything out?”

    Scott Alexander squirms. “Yes, I think so.”

    “Great!” Eric puts his shirt back on, then claps Dr. Alexander on the shoulder. “Best of luck. Enjoy your water.”

    Once Eric leaves, Scott locks the door. He hefts the gear vest. A tag sewn into the padded shoulder section pledges lifetime support for all customers of B&S Armaments. Scott pokes gingerly through the vest’s contents, bewildered by the labels attached to each item. Glass Knuckles. Gas Knuckles. Soaky Surprise: “convert any sidearm into a water pistol.” What on earth?

    Scott stoops to set Eric’s vest of goodies on the floor, but a sudden wooziness and bursting chest pain cause him to lose his balance and drop the vest. He lies on the floor, panting. Gee. I’m supposed to be unflappable, but I’ll be in trouble if I don’t get myself Squared away.

    The pain slowly subsides. The Man of Slate clambers into his fancy chair, and leans it as far back as possible. He covers his face with his fedora, and goes to sleep.
    -#-#-
    This episode of Slate Star Showdex brought to you by:
    Complice.

    Most small crooks pull solo capers;
    Coppers always work in pairs.
    You don’t need to read the papers:
    You can guess who wins out there.

    Partnership may keep you safer,
    But it brings new woes to boot.
    How do you know they won’t waste you
    While you’re carving up the loot?

    Let me tell you all a secret:
    Crime don’t have to be that way.
    I know toughs that can be trusted.
    My new firm can save your day!

    My name, sirs, is Mal O’Malley.
    Complice has the thugs you need.
    Doesn’t matter who you’re seeking:
    Satisfaction’s guaranteed!

  18. JayT says:
    March 18, 2020 at 1:20 pm

    What’s going on in the UK? Compared to the US, they have relatively high testing numbers (50K vs 70k with a fifth the population) and much lower infection rates (2,600 vs 8,000), but they are really close in deaths (104 vs 127). IS there a difference in reporting or something?

    • AlesZiegler says:
      March 18, 2020 at 1:41 pm

      Probably what is happening is that even 50K tests in the UK is a drop in the bucket and real absolute number of cases in the UK is closer to the US than numbers are showing.

    • Tarpitz says:
      March 18, 2020 at 7:19 pm

      Yeah, to date we’ve mostly been testing people only in hospitals. The last estimate I heard for the real case count, a couple of days ago, was 35-50,000.

      • JayT says:
        March 18, 2020 at 8:04 pm

        Other than South Korea, is anyone checking the population at large? I think most countries are only testing people that are going to hospitals.

        • Evan Þ says:
          March 18, 2020 at 10:53 pm

          Taiwan is, and they’ve been doing excellently.

        • matthewravery says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:38 am

          No one in the West is doing wide-spread testing, which is one of the main reasons why we’re doing so poorly w.r.t. containment and transmission when compared to various South East Asian countries.

  19. j1000000 says:
    March 18, 2020 at 2:04 pm

    What is your favorite video game song of all time? Mine is probably the Title Theme from Ocarina of Time.

    (!corona, per the suggestion from oriscratch to label non-Corona comments)

    • Conrad Honcho says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:08 pm

      The entire soundtrack to Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

      • fortyCakes says:
        March 19, 2020 at 3:12 am

        Gaur Plains (Day) from Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is a contender for me.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:14 am

          There’s a kid on youtube who does amazing rock guitar remixes of video game songs and has done just about everything from XB2, but also Gaur Plains. For about 2 weeks I listened to nothing at work besides his XB2 playlist.

    • smocc says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:10 pm

      The main theme from Deus Ex. Followed by the whole soundtrack from Deus Ex.

      • j1000000 says:
        March 18, 2020 at 2:17 pm

        Yeah I think part of the problem with this question is that it’s so heavily tied in with your experience of the game. My favorite song is probably the entire OoT soundtrack, even the weird droning boring songs. I’ve tried to listen to other acclaimed soundtracks of games I’ve never played and generally feel nothing about them as music by itself.

        I played FF7 until you get out of Midgar. I frequently listen to a lot of the songs from the game that played while I was playing, but I’ve tried listening to music from the rest of the album and it does nothing for me.

        • smocc says:
          March 18, 2020 at 8:43 pm

          Is that very different from all favorite songs? Most of my favorite songs are tied to some experience or period of life. Only a few of my favorite songs are my favorite purely for their musical interest.

          However, let me pick two favorites that is not also from my favorite game:
          – Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory – Bank Soundtrack
          – Undertale – Undyne fight music

          Both are examples of songs that made already good gaming moments into unforgettable gaming moments. The Bank soundtrack is mostly background but has a sort of 70’s action movie vibe that makes you feel way cooler as you dodge laser tripwires.

          All the music from Undertale is good but Undyne’s theme is the only one I can consistently pull up from my memory on command because of how shockingly cool it made everything the first time I heard it

          • j1000000 says:
            March 19, 2020 at 5:11 am

            There are definitely a lot of (non video game) songs I like because they remind me of certain times in my life, but in general a person can recommend a (non video game) song to me and I can like it, even just sitting there by myself listening to it on a random day.

            This has yet to happen with a video game song outside of the context of video games, yet I really like a lot of songs from games I played — Tifa’s Theme or Spirit Temple or Comet Observatory or whatever.

    • eyeballfrog says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:15 pm

      There’s a lot of competition, but I think my favorite is the Fire Emblem theme. Tons of good music in that series, too.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:23 pm

      I love 8-bit stuff. Ninja Gaiden II, Lord of Night.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrIv3W0-LGc&list=PL963CFB616E20C171&index=10

      They used the Battlefield music for bosses across the first 3 NES games, but never in the XBox versions from what I know.

    • Ouroborobot says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:24 pm

      I have the most nostalgia for the 16-bit era. For me it’s probably something from Chrono Trigger, “Corridors of Time”, maybe. Or the entirety of the FFVI OST.

      • MrApophenia says:
        March 18, 2020 at 8:07 pm

        Yeah, something from VI for me. The finale where they do the orchestral version of each character’s theme blew my goddamn mind as a kid.

        • AG says:
          March 21, 2020 at 9:28 am

          You should look up some of the Dancing Mad covers on actual magnificent pipe organs on Youtube.

      • AG says:
        March 19, 2020 at 2:51 pm

        I consider Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda to be up there with John Williams.

        The Chrono Trigger main theme is truly great stuff. Meanwhile, I feel like FFVI might have made the whole opera sequence because they wanted to showcase Nobuo’s talent so much.

        • Matt M says:
          March 19, 2020 at 3:08 pm

          Yeah, I love the soundtracks for FFVI, FFVII, and CT the most. FFX has a few gems but isn’t as consistent.

          If I had to pick a favorite, it’s probably Cosmo Canyon from FFVII.

          • AG says:
            March 21, 2020 at 9:27 am

            The Chrono Cross main theme is also good stuff.

            The updates of VII’s themes for Advent Children may have legit ruined me for movie soundtracks. I’m always comparing modern soundtracks to AC’s in terms of “how many tracks can I put on my music player and jam to all the way through” and so most of them don’t even have 50% of AC’s.

    • JayT says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:45 pm

      Not really a “video game song”, but the entire soundtrack to Wipeout XL shaped my musical preferences to this day.

      Some games I remember really liking the music to include:
      Sonic CD
      Hitman 2
      Halo
      Tomb Raider
      Donkey Kong Jr.

      I’m sure there’s a bunch of others I’m forgetting.

    • FrankistGeorgist says:
      March 18, 2020 at 2:54 pm

      Simcity 4’s By the Bay.

    • matthewravery says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:09 pm

      Megaman 2 Woodman Theme

      Airman is a close second. The whole soundtrack from that game is really good.

    • Deiseach says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:13 pm

      Can’t say “of all time”, but the (apparently) new music for The Crypt in Path of Exile – I find the music so relaxing that it’s distracting, I get jumped by mobs because my character is just standing there listening to the music 🙂

      Soundtrack for Disco Elysium was good too, real blast from the past to learn it was done by British Sea Power.

      • matthewravery says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:33 am

        The new league couldn’t have come out at a better time for me. I don’t love the mechanic, but I think they’ve managed to integrate all of the previous mechanics well that it’s a fantastic play.

    • profgerm says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:21 pm

      OoT is one of my favorite game soundtracks. While it’s not quite my favorite, I’ll recommend this cover of “We All Lift Together” from Warframe.

    • bullseye says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:47 pm

      Lu Bu’s theme from Dynasty Warriors. The version from 8 is especially good, and the version from 7 has lyrics!

      I can’t find it now, but there’s a video of a live concert where the guy sings the song in full Lu Bu costume.

    • Jake R says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:55 pm

      To Zanarkand – Final Fantasy X

    • Paul Brinkley says:
      March 18, 2020 at 4:21 pm

      I play a lot of video games. I can say that I will probably never have a favorite video game song of all time. They’re too diverse, and I have too many moods.

      Sometimes I want the peaceful pastoralism of Jeremy Soule, brought to us by the Elder Scrolls saga. That includes music that never played in a video game, such as his Northerner Diaries, but this thread is about video game music so I won’t link it.

      Sometimes I want something pastoral, but not Elder Scrolls. For that, there’s Slopes of the Blessure from the Blood and Wine expansion to Witcher 3.

      Sometimes I like a little doom. For that, there’s Matt Uelmen. His Kurast theme from Diablo II is my favorite from that game.

      Sometimes I want something more futuristic, and turn to Michael McCann. I prefer his Deus Ex soundtrack to that of the original, which I found a bit too tinny and pretentious.

      Maybe something futuristic in the fusion sense? Something to make you want to watch The Martian again? There’s George Strezov doing Surviving Mars. Or, there’s Andreas Waldetoft, with Creation and Beyond, from Stellaris. Or maybe Jack Wall’s Samara Suite, from Mass Effect 2? I can just imagine an army of female psionics raining vengeful havoc…

      Sometimes I want an exotic sound with a beat. For that, there’s Sarah Schachner, of Assassin’s Creed: Origins fame. Consider Winds of Cyrene, for example. Oddly, my current favorite song from her isn’t from AC:O, however; it’s Valor, from Bioware’s Anthem. (If only that game was as good as its soundtrack…)

      Speaking of Assassin’s Creed: I often think one of the best things that franchise did was to change composers from game to game. They started with Jesper Kyd, and it was terrific. But then they went with Lorne Balfe for #3, then Brian Tyler for Black Flag (Pyrates Beware!), then Elitsa Alexandrova for Rogue, Chris Tilton for Unity, Austin Wintory for Syndicate, Schachner for Origins, and The Flight for Odyssey. The result was a different, fresh texture for each game. I never got tired of the style; they all went into my playlist.

      There’s old school stuff I like, too. Check out Robyn Miller, who AFAICT only ever did one soundtrack before apparently drifting off to other stuff. But it was Riven, so I’d say he went out on top. Or, to remind me of the days of Star Control and its crowdsourced Finnish music, or of the demoscene of the 1990s, there’s Skaven’s soundtrack to Bejeweled 2.

      Then there’s space, with a western feel. My favorite is hard to choose there, too; there’s the Terran themes from Starcraft 2, for example. Or we just go harder western and hear
      Lynchwood combat from Borderlands 2. Trouble is, whenever I think of BL2, I can’t help but think of the theme to Flamerock Refuge, which… makes me want to play the game again.

    • Seikilos says:
      March 18, 2020 at 5:47 pm

      Civilization VI, Greek Theme. Be sure to listen to all era variations.

      It is based on the Seikilos Epitaph, the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world.

    • Chalid says:
      March 18, 2020 at 5:56 pm

      Civilization 4: “Baba Yetu”

      • Silverlock says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:35 am

        +1 — I still have this on my phone years after the game came out. (Although, strictly speaking, the music wasn’t written for the game.)

        • Matt M says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:38 am

          Yeah, I don’t really think this counts as “video game music” in any meaningful sense.

          It doesn’t even play in the game proper! Only in the intro video and title screen!

        • achenx says:
          March 19, 2020 at 7:44 am

          Yes it was. Firaxis tried to license some other piece of music (something from Hans Zimmer IIRC) but couldn’t get it. Soren Johnson, the designer, contacted his old Stanford roommate Christopher Tin to write something for them instead, and he wrote Baba Yetu and had a Stanford student choir record it.

          Later Tin rerecorded it with a professional choir for his album but it was definitely written for Civ 4 in the first place.

    • BBA says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:12 pm

      As my avatar would suggest, I’m partial to the music from Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?, though I’ve never actually played the game since I’m lousy at platformers. (I do use the doods a lot when I play Disgaea games though.)

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:41 pm

      Any answer I give is wrong, there’s simply too many, but…

      …The entire Witcher 3 Soundtrack. But of particular note are is the ambient beauty of “Spikeroog” and “Fanfare and Flowers”, the adrenaline and tension of “Hunt or Be Hunted” and “Steel For Humans”, the Fairy-Tale horror of “The Ladies Of The Wood” and “Heart Of Stone/The Gifted Man Brings Gifts Galore”, and the intrigue of “Mystery Man”.

    • beleester says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:42 pm

      Something from the Touhou series, but I’ll be damned if I can pick just one – the series has been knocking it out of the park for years. Either Emotional Skyscraper or Love-Colored Master Spark.

      If you want something more orchestral, I’d go with “Revived Power” from Shadow of the Colossus. Now that’s a track that makes you feel on top of the world. (Or on top of a giant monster, as the case may be.)

    • Jaskologist says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:54 pm

      David Wise is the greatest composer of the modern era. Which is to say, all of the music in all of the Donkey Kong Countries, but especially Stickerbush Symphony.

      So good, it’s the only place on Youtube you should read the comments.

    • Tarpitz says:
      March 18, 2020 at 7:17 pm

      I couldn’t name a song, but the Mass Effect soundtrack contributed hugely to my enjoyment of the game, particularly in the climactic sequence on the Citadel.

    • CatCube says:
      March 18, 2020 at 7:50 pm

      The Moon Theme from Ducktales NES (And its reuse as Della’s Lullaby in the new Ducktales)

      Mining Melancholy from Donkey Kong Country is probably a close second.

    • littskad says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:40 pm

      The intro song to Secret of Monkey Island.

      • Robin says:
        March 20, 2020 at 4:35 am

        I kind of prefer the version from Monkey Island 2. But the best version is on the harp.

        Monkey Island is full of great tunes: The LeChuck theme, Jojo the monkey, Largo LaGrande… Loom™ is nice too, easy when you hire Tchaikovsky as a composer.

        Along the same line, I also like the Leisure Suit Larry theme. Here is the lounge version.

        • Paul Brinkley says:
          March 20, 2020 at 9:49 am

          I have to admit, the jazz piano in LSL6:Love For Sail was exceptionally good. I have to look for more of Frank Zottoli’s music some time.

    • DeWitt says:
      March 19, 2020 at 1:58 am

      I’m not sure that I’m willing to pick any specifics, but the entire soundtrack from Medieval 2 Total War is something beautiful to be sure.

    • KieferO says:
      March 19, 2020 at 7:57 am

      The song titled “Vigil” from Mass Effect.

      I also like “4000 Degrees Kelvin” from Portal. It very clearly conveys the story message: You need to get out of here. NOW!

    • Skivverus says:
      March 19, 2020 at 8:08 am

      I tend to think of it in terms of “games with good music” than “specific soundtracks in those games”, partly because there’s so many good ones out there. Tastes run mostly to the orchestral. But enough explanation, some names:
      Ori and the Blind Forest
      FF7
      Total Annihilation
      Epic Battle Fantasy
      Civilization: Beyond Earth

      • Vitor says:
        March 19, 2020 at 1:13 pm

        Seconding Ori. In particular, Restoring the Light, Facing the Dark will always stick with me, as it’s associated to one of the most exhilarating, joyful experiences I’ve ever had from a single-player game.

        Very beautiful game. I’m playing the sequel as we speak (came out ~1 week ago).

    • Paul Brinkley says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:42 am

      I have a bigger post in moderation (likely due to all the links), but for now I will advocate:

      Pyrates Beware!, Brian Tyler, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. (One of the things I think UbiSoft did right was to change composers for every AC game, resulting in a different, fresh texture for each one. That, and every composer they picked turned out to be a winner by many accounts.)

      Samara Suite, Jack Wall, Mass Effect 2.

      Creation and Beyond, Andreas Waldetoft, Stellaris.

      Valor, Sarah Schachner, Anthem. (If only that game was as good as its soundtrack…)

    • AG says:
      March 19, 2020 at 2:42 pm

      Chuchu chulu chu chu chuchulu chuchu chulu chu chu chuchulu Da naaaaaaananananana na na nana na nananaaaaaa

      Other than that, Nintendo is pretty unimpeachable, with the ultimate classics of Koji Kondo, but that Wii theme music by Kazumi Totaka is also quite the modern classic.

    • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:17 pm

      I’m a sucker for the 8-bit melodies of Super Mario Land 2. The main (‘athletic’) theme is cheerful and bouncy, and harmonically interesting. You’ve got a classic mario-esque melody bouncing between the brass and strings 25% and 50% square wave, a steady syncopated bass line, and a banjo-esque string of 16th notes throughout. Plus a good ol’ modulation up a whole step in the B section.

      Some might call it lazy, but what I thought was real creative was the way Kazumi Totaka reuses the same melody in different ways for each of the different area themes. Not in the “exact same music but with different instruments” way they do in New Soup Wii, but actually reworking the theme into different styles, with different accompaniments, variations on the theme, chord progressions, and even putting it in 3/4 for the moon theme. Plus the haunted house theme quotes the “bonus room” melody from Mario Land 1, which is a nice touch.

    • dodrian says:
      March 20, 2020 at 5:33 am

      The Jet Force Gemini theme remains my all time favorite.

      Others have brought up the Civ VI soundtrack, which is also superb especially in how it themes with the game, and Katamari Damacy was great too. Fez is the other game that pops into my mind when I think of soundtracks.

    • Ant says:
      March 20, 2020 at 11:48 am

      3 that haven’t been mentionned
      The main menu theme from spellforce: breath of winter is superb, and I know people who bought the games just to be able to listen to it.
      The main menu theme from the eragon videogame is a good bombastic orchestral song. I don’t know what the videogame is like, though, I haven’t play it.
      Ico you were there

      Other videogames with good music
      Heroes of might and magic the whole series
      Age of wonders the whole series
      Shadow of the Collossus
      Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, but I might be biased by nostalgia.
      Spellforce in general.

    • Tatterdemalion says:
      March 21, 2020 at 11:18 am

      “Angels on our curtains” from Myst IV. It’s a great game, you have to solve a bunch of hard puzzles to get to the point where you hear the song, and I found it really emotionally affecting when I did.

      The Monkey Island theme is also awesome, as is “That’s Death” from the credits of the second Discworld game.

  20. Le Maistre Chat says:
    March 18, 2020 at 2:06 pm

    Italy’s coronavirus deaths jumped by 475 in one day.
    Calculations: Italy went into lockdown a week ago. Incubation period is up to 14 days. Without lockdown, cases were doubling every ~6 days. So best case scenario, Italian deaths will peak at 475*2.31= ~1,100 daily deaths.
    The United States is an estimated 13+ days behind Italy in symptomatic cases and we don’t know when even the epicenters (New York City commuting era, metro Seattle, metro Boston) will be ordered to shelter in place (fortunately the Bay Area has), let alone the whole country. So it could get as bad here as Italy per capita, or ~5,850 deaths.
    Minimum time to that point: 20 days starting March 19.
    Sustain that death rate for 14 days while the virus is starved of new hosts and we’ll lose ~82,000 Americans during the April peak.

    • 10240 says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:41 pm

      Without lockdown, cases were doubling every ~6 days.

      They were doubling more like every 3 days in Italy.

      Incubation period is up to 14 days.

      Most of the time it’s much less, however there is also a 5–10 day delay between initial symptoms and diagnosis, and a 10–14 day delay between diagnosis and death (based on charts from China).

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        March 18, 2020 at 4:02 pm

        They were doubling more like every 3 days in Italy.

        That… really sucks, since it means daily deaths could go up to 2,200 by that same math.

        Most of the time it’s much less, however there is also a 5–10 day delay between initial symptoms and diagnosis, and a 10–14 day delay between diagnosis and death (based on charts from China).

        That should only apply to the initial outbreak in China, right? Unless a country doesn’t have enough tests to diagnosis everyone who says “Hey I have COVID-like symptoms” as they say so?

    • Wrong Species says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:53 pm

      The US is no longer two weeks behind Italy. Their cases are now growing linearly while ours are still growing exponentially. It’s more like six days now.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        March 18, 2020 at 7:22 pm

        US known cases are growing exponentially because we’re far behind in testing, no?
        We stand at 140 dead, which is behind Italy on March 5. Their deaths are now increasing by 16-19% a day. To reach absolute, not per capita daily deaths in 6 days, 475 Americans would die from it 6 days from now, which would be an exponential curve of 51.5%:
        Today: 40 deaths
        T+1: 60
        T+2: 92
        T+3: 139
        T+4: 211
        T+5: 319
        T+6: 483
        At T+10, we’d hit per capita death rates equivalent to Italy’s March 18 (2,544 US deaths).

        • Wrong Species says:
          March 18, 2020 at 8:02 pm

          Well, cases are growing exponentially because its a pandemic. But we have seen a spike in US cases in the last couple days and I’m hoping that’s just because of better testing.

          I’m not sure if looking at death rates is necessarily a better indicator of how widespread it really is, because a lot of that is a reflection of the healthcare system rather than only how far the disease is spread. But maybe I’m wrong on that. South Korea has less deaths and better testing. Maybe that’s why Germany’s deaths are so low compared to Italy?

          • Hoopdawg says:
            March 19, 2020 at 6:45 am

            I’ve come to believe that deaths are in fact a much better indicator of the overall infection rates than diagnoses. Lack of testing simply means a lot of mild and asymptomatic cases go under a radar. And the difference in testing is enormous. South Korea and Germany both test(/ed) extensively, while the US started off almost comically incompetent in that regard.

            You should actually hope that the numbers are reasonably accurate, because the alternative is that (i) the disease is already much more widespread than they indicate, and (ii) it is not being contained, because the infected aren’t being discovered, isolated and quarantined. Unfortunately, the alternative seems to be true for the US.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:04 am

            I’ve come to believe that deaths are in fact a much better indicator of the overall infection rates than diagnoses.

            They are a more accurate and less gameable indicator than reported infection rates. But they are a lagging indicator, by a week or two. That’s a problem if you’re trying to forecast results or offer policy guidance in an environment as dynamic as this one.

            And in the short term, they’re probably going to provide confirmation bias for “we’re doomed, nothing we do makes any difference!” because they’re measuring the results from two weeks ago when most of the things that might make a difference weren’t being done outside of Asia.

          • Wrong Species says:
            March 19, 2020 at 11:03 am

            Let’s imagine that death rates are the true indicator of how widespread a disease is and per South Korea, the death rate is at one percent of actual cases. Italy is reporting 5000 deaths which would mean the actual number is 500,000 instead of the reported 41,000. Do you really think they are off by half a million cases?

            Also, John’s right. It’s a lagging indicator.

          • Hoopdawg says:
            March 20, 2020 at 1:30 am

            There are additional factors that suggest that both Korea and Italy are outliers (in different directions, Korea’s cases skew young, Italy’s old).

            But even if they were otherwise comparable, I am not suggesting making a simple arithmetic calculation gives you a “true” number of cases. What I’m saying is, it is very much possible that the infection rates in Italy (the UK, the US…) are off by a factor, and we can’t tell, their actual numbers are just not credible. (Germany’s are much more credible, and South Korea’s plausibly close to actual number, given that they caught enough of them to stop the spread of the disease.) If you want to compare the spread of the disease between any of those nations, death rates are a much better measure. Yes, obviously they’re lagging, but so are diagnoses, and the deaths are at least meaningful and plausible, as it’s significantly harder to miss them.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:12 pm

          Today: 40 deaths
          T+1: 60
          T+2: 92
          T+3: 139
          T+4: 211
          T+5: 319
          T+6: 483
          At T+10, we’d hit per capita death rates equivalent to Italy’s March 18 (2,544 US deaths).

          So the actual numbers were T = 41 and T+1 = 64 deaths.
          Italian daily deaths dropped from 475 to 427, so we are on track to have 100 deaths tomorrow and worse absolute numbers than Italy’s March peak on T+6 (591 on March 24 by this exponential curve). Pray that it doesn’t grow to Italian levels per capita.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            March 20, 2020 at 7:27 pm

            The US daily death toll is flat from 3-19 -> 3-20, but Italy’s daily death toll jumped from 427 to a new high of 627.
            The number for the US ever getting hit as hard as Italy is now >3,340 deaths in one day. I can’t guess if or when that could happen without tomorrow’s data.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            March 21, 2020 at 8:17 pm

            Clicking the blue link above now shows T = 41, T+1 = 57, T+2 = 49, and T+3 = 88. That’s one day behind the original prediction curve, but that 80% jump is a bad sign.

      • JayT says:
        March 18, 2020 at 7:36 pm

        We are testing far more now than we were even a few days ago. We had tested less than 10,000 total people a week ago, and now we’re at like 80,000, so it doesn’t really tell us much about the growth of cases. Deaths haven’t been exponential, at least.

          • JayT says:
            March 18, 2020 at 8:25 pm

            Hmm…that data’s different from what I was looking at. I need to go back and look at what I had.

        • Douglas Knight says:
          March 18, 2020 at 8:11 pm

          Total deaths in both countries look exponential to me, with the same slope on a log graph.

          In the past 10 days, American deaths have multiplied by 6.8, while Italian by 8.1, a 20% increase each day. (Whereas, in the preceding 10 days, Italian deaths multiplied by 22, a 36% increase each day.)

          • The Nybbler says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:57 am

            Lots of things look exponential on a semilog graph. If there is exponential growth, the rate of increase is also exponential. The rate of increase of deaths is too noisy to tell, unfortunately.

            The latest NY numbers, and their locations, have made me much more pessimistic. I have severe doubts that the NYC and NYS Departments of Corrections can do anything about an outbreak (or even be bothered to try). And apparently there’s a cluster in the Hassidic Jewish community, which has been ignoring social distancing.

  21. SolipsisticUtilitarian says:
    March 18, 2020 at 2:06 pm

    Similar to the post below, what is going on in Japan? A priori, we should expect Japan to be in very dire straits right now.
    They had a bunch of early cases, high population density, no social distancing measures at first and only lukewarm ones later(school closures, but bars etc. remain open), little testing, and most importantly a very old population. The popular hypothesis is that the country is too invested in holding the Olympics to publicly acknowledge the problem, but reports of hospital’s being overwhelmed like in Italy should still make it out. Is mask wearing the secret silver bullet?

    • Wrong Species says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:04 pm

      Japan is much less physically interconnected to the world than other rich countries. I would bet that has something to do with it.

    • Carolus says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:11 pm

      I’m living in Japan and I’ve been having the same questions!

      I do think you underestimate the level of social distancing. Although places are still open people are going out less. I boarded a train in Shibuya station (a major transit hub), and I could have sat if I wanted. Usually I have to shove my way in. People are still out and there are some crowds, but it is obvious that it is different than it was this time last year.

      People are generally more hygienic here – no hugging or kissing of friends and family and all restaurants give you a wet nap and the beginning of a meal to clean your hands. It is not unusual for people to wash their hands when coming home, especially after taking public transit. When I moved here last January (2019), I thought the constant harping about the flu season in the media was funny and odd, but now it seems well founded.

      The medical system in Japan seems very responsive compared to the US. So, I’d guess there are more beds available for the very sick. I’ve been to the hospital a few times with my new daughter for checkups and it hasn’t seemed overwhelmed or even particularly busy.

      I’m sure the numbers are being fiddled a bit; I’d love to see the total mortality rate for 2019 vs 2020. Having said that, I think Japan is managing it very well and has some cultural advantages that help it along. The masks may not help too much, but they are probably a visible sign of other differences.

      • voso says:
        March 18, 2020 at 6:20 pm

        This is hard for me to buy; even if I were to grant you that Japan simply has a more hygienic culture, four times more hygienic? (at least, judging by daily growth %)

        I think “a huge vector for this virus is asymptomatic transmission, and Japanese people love wearing masks regardless if they feel sick or not” is a much more compelling explanation (but, again, the numbers are quite bewildering).

        • Carolus says:
          March 18, 2020 at 6:30 pm

          Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the numbers are not accurate. But, the fact is that the hospitals are not overwhelmed, despite all the disadvantages OP mentioned. So, what are the advantages?

          I’m not sure how to read your two paragraphs in conjunction. It seems to me the second paragraph contradicts the first. To me, wearing masks is part of a cultural obsession with hygiene.

          Either way, I think Japan is doing well for multiple reasons – social distancing, good healthcare, hygienic culture (for lack of a better term) and because they are fudging the numbers a bit.

          • Loriot says:
            March 18, 2020 at 7:04 pm

            Doesn’t Japan have nearly 5x the beds per capita of the US?

          • JayT says:
            March 18, 2020 at 7:55 pm

            They only have 900 cases though, and I think any first world country could handle that without much issue. The question is why it isn’t growing faster there. Are they more strict about quarantine because they have extra beds or something?

          • baconbits9 says:
            March 20, 2020 at 10:11 am

            So, what are the advantages?

            Japan does have very low rates of heart disease and diabetes which are two major contributing factors to complications and serve outcomes. It seems highly likely that their high overall health scores are a significant benefit.

        • zoozoc says:
          March 18, 2020 at 11:38 pm

          Isn’t this simply how R0 values work? Sounds like Japanese culture and their adjustments has brought the R0 value to close to 1, so it is growing very slowly.

        • Ketil says:
          March 19, 2020 at 12:24 am

          Japanese people love wearing masks

          I wonder. One thing the East Asian countries seem to have in common, is widespread use of face masks. Here, nobody wears them, and authorities claim they are not necessary (as the virus isn’t airborne).

          Another thing the East Asians seem to have in common, is getting the pandemic under control.

          • SolipsisticUtilitarian says:
            March 19, 2020 at 2:13 am

            I would love for everybody to wear face masks here as well, but even in Asian countries people do not wear masks at home or at work, so it can only be part of the explanation.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 19, 2020 at 6:24 am

            I was under the impression the masks stop sick people wearing them from spreading the illness, but don’t do anything for healthy people.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:
            March 19, 2020 at 6:42 am

            Yes, but if you may be contagious and asymptomatic. So you may not be “sick,” but still getting other people sick.

          • EchoChaos says:
            March 19, 2020 at 6:45 am

            @Conrad Honcho

            That’s pretty much correct. It’s spread by droplet, which usually comes out of the sick person by coughing.

            Wearing a mask correctly to not ever violate its integrity and keep everything out is hard, but wearing it correctly to catch what you’re coughing out is easy.

            “don’t do anything for healthy people” is too far, as properly worn masks do protect you pretty well, but they’re less of a big deal for a healthy person than proper isolation.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 19, 2020 at 6:55 am

            That’s pretty much correct. It’s spread by droplet, which usually comes out of the sick person by coughing.

            And, to elaborate, is usually deposited on some surface where the next person touches it with their fingers, then touches their eyes or nose or whatnot half an hour later.

            The mask provides protection in the case where someone coughs right in your face and you directly inhale the droplets, but that’s a minor transmission vector. Still, it’s a sufficiently obvious one that one may lose credibility with an absolute “masks don’t do anything for healthy people”. Better to say that they do very little for healthy people, and better still to have a sound bite on why.

          • Matt M says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:01 am

            Right-wing Twitter is increasingly settling on a narrative of “masks work well, but the elites leaked a bunch of ‘masks don’t work’ stories in the media so they could stockpile them all for themselves.”

    • Chalid says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:00 pm

      Japan closed schools very early in the epidemic, so this might be evidence that kids are asymptomatic super-spreaders.

    • eric23 says:
      March 19, 2020 at 1:42 am

      All East Asian countries have done well, except China at the very beginning, and South Korea when the disease got into a secretive cult. They all learned lessons from SARS last decade and were prepared with effective plans for both isolation and testing. Japan is actually doing worse than some other countries like Taiwan.

      • matthewravery says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:31 am

        This. It isn’t magic. Many of these countries have already experienced similar (and more deadly!) outbreaks. They citizens are aware of how to act, and the government is aware of what to ask of them and when.

        Imagine this happens in the US again in a few years. We’ll be much less panicky, the government will be better prepared, and fewer people will scoff at the threat and deliberately make things worse.

  22. hash872 says:
    March 18, 2020 at 2:07 pm

    (Non coronavirus post!) So I had kind of an interesting psychological experience the other week. I was fairly anxious about some IRL problems (like not imagined/in my head, but conventional life issues), and I remembered that I had a bottle of hydroxyzine laying around that I’ve never used. It’s an anti-hystamine that I guess works as a fast-acting, temporary anti-anxiety drug as well.

    I took one 25mg pill, and felt much better if a bit sleepy. What I found interesting was that my entire mindset towards the problems changed, not just during the duration of the drug’s effects but over the subsequent few days. I had no return of anxiety the next day or afterwards, and I was able to approach everything a lot more rationally. It was as if…. short-circuiting the anxiety loop immediately changed my outlook and prevented any further spells, far past what anyone’s claiming are the drug’s actual effects.

    Is this a psychological phenomena- immediate negative circuit-breaking that prevents the ‘spiral’? I found it a whole lot more effective than CBT. Anything similar for depression- a mild, immediate action drug?

    • noyann says:
      March 19, 2020 at 1:55 am

      Long lasting effect is no surprise. Wikipedia:

      The Tmax of hydroxyzine is about 2.0 hours in both adults and children and its elimination half-life is around 20.0 hours in adults

      That does not rule out a psychological ‘switch’.

  23. Deiseach says:
    March 18, 2020 at 3:01 pm

    Europe is really taking severe measures to deal with COVID-19 – this year’s Eurovision has been cancelled!

    Probably the most sensible decision, but a pity all the same; they decided that even without a live audience as just a TV broadcast they wouldn’t chance it. In other news, the nephew is doing better – fever is going down, he had a nice hot shower and is feeling better. Family still have to self-isolate for 14 days but thank goodness (and thank the nine-hour novena to Archangel Raphael) that he’s not severe so far.

    All the best to you all and keep on keeping safe!

    • FrankistGeorgist says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:17 pm

      So we can say definitively that the European experiment has failed.

      Good to hear about the nephew!

      • AG says:
        March 19, 2020 at 2:36 pm

        I mean, a TV broadcast or even any kind of concert, with zero audience, still takes a whole bunch of people, from performing artists to backdancers to accompaniment to judges to makeup to lighting to sound crew to managers to general setup crew to broadcast crew. Very few venues have the space to allow for social distancing for that.

        This one Japan franchise held a no-audience concert, filmed and uploaded it to a VR app (which others subsequently ripped and uploaded to Youtube in 360), and you could see how many people were all over the place, even with zero audience, and much less how cramped backstage likely was.

    • Plumber says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:25 pm

      @Deiseach,
      Happy to learn that your nephew is fairing better!

    • Nick says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:51 pm

      Good to hear your nephew is getting better!

    • Deiseach says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:53 am

      Thank you all for the kind wishes, yeah I’m relieved 🙂

      Eurovision shall not be defeated! This is merely a temporary setback, it will rise from the ashes like a glorious phoenix next year, bigger and brasher than ever!

  24. Plumber says:
    March 18, 2020 at 3:24 pm

    Lots of “What’s going on in [place] questions, here’s another one:

    What’s changed where you live and work since last week?

    • John Schilling says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:33 pm

      Work has gone to almost full telecommuting, which is a bit more than I’d prefer but mostly not a big deal for at least a few weeks. Going to be a bigger deal when we start having to do launch support, and there are some other activities where FTF meetings work much better than the alternative.

      Home, I don’t have to deal with kids being out of school. I do have to deal with restaurants being closed and grocery stores absolutely out of the staples I normally use for home cooking. There’s no danger of going hungry, but maintaining a diet that is both healthy and palatable is very annoying and I’m pretty sure it’s “healthy” that is going to be sacrificed if this keeps up. And, cabin fever is a thing.

    • bullseye says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:36 pm

      Here in Ohio they closed all the bars and restaurants starting Sunday evening. (They still do delivery and carryout, though. Their employees have started wearing gloves, or at least the ones I’ve seen have.) Also our primary was supposed to be yesterday, but the day before they decided to reschedule.

      I had been teleworking about half the time, but as of this week it’s all the time. The system we use for conference calls is getting overwhelmed.

      There’s a gaming store nearby that is still open but has cancelled their Magic: The Gathering events.

    • Plumber says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:37 pm

      I work in San Francisco, California and live 15 miles from work in Alameda County.

      Since last week:
      1) Schools have closed

      2) Public libraries have closed

      3) Bars/pubs/taverns have closed

      4) Restaurants are “take out only”

      5) A general “shelter in place” order is in effect, drug stores, grocery stores, and gas stations are to remain open, people may go to them, and walk/jog but are to remain 6′ from each other, no groups of more than ten allowed, otherwise stay at home.

      Yesterday I saw a line around the block of people waiting to get into a supermarket.

      My job has been deemed an “essential City disaster service worker” one and I’m still at work, but my commute is now 25 minutes instead of 90 minutes, on the streets I see few except cops, deputies, and dazed drug-users/schizophrenics, with at most a tenth of cars being driven compared to last week.

      • JayT says:
        March 18, 2020 at 3:49 pm

        I haven’t been downtown since last week, are you seeing the same number of homeless people, or are they hunkering down too?

        • Plumber says:
          March 18, 2020 at 3:58 pm

          @Jay T,
          I haven’t been north of Market Street, and all I’ve really seen of San Francisco is parts of “SOMA”, but from what I’ve seen it’s about half of the usual numbers of homeless, but they’re now the majority of people on the streets.

          I’ll drive down Folsom in a few minutes and see if that looks any different.

        • Plumber says:
          March 19, 2020 at 1:17 pm

          @JayT says:

          “I haven’t been downtown since last week, are you seeing the same number of homeless people, or are they hunkering down too?”

          I took the long way and didn’t pass by the 5th Street tent camp yesterday, but Folsom from 6th to 1st hardly had any visibly homeless at all, there were less than a hundredth of the usual number of pedestrians, of those left I saw one grey-haired couple (both wearing masks), and one child with their parents, mostly they were young adult singles and couples.
          Driving through Berkeley it looked much the same but with more bicyclists, when I crossed the Brandywine and reached Hobbiton from my driveway I could see a grey-haired lady speaking to a trio of young women on the corner (and yes, they were all within 6′ of each other), taking my stir crazy three year old for a walk around the block showed that the few other pedestrians gave a wide berth. The air smelled floral and the ever present sound of cars was mostly gone.

          This morning Bryant Street still had one beggar (man) and one screaming schizophrenic (women), a few cops (who all stayed close to each other), and some lawyers. Across the street the new housing construction project is still manned, apparently housing construction has been deemed ‘essential’ and will continue.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:
      March 18, 2020 at 3:51 pm

      Statewide: K-12 and universities are shut down or switched to distance learning. Theaters, sports and concert venues, gyms, hair and nail salons, community centers, and daycares must all shut down as of 5 PM today. Possibly also bars and restaurants except for take-out and delivery?
      The Kentucky Derby is postponed to September.
      The Bishops of Lexington and Louisville shut down public masses until further notice (I would assume we have a dispensation to miss Sunday and holy day of obligation masses?). Some Protestant churches are carrying on as usual.

    • The Nybbler says:
      March 18, 2020 at 4:01 pm

      I’m in NJ. My office is work-from-home only since Monday (but I’m technically on vacation now). Restaurants are takeout only. Some bars are now allowed to serve drinks to go. Haircuts are by appointment only, no walk-ins (I got mine cut just before this happened). Most public offices, including the MVC (Motor Vehicle Commission) are closed. Jury trials are suspended. Malls are closed, gyms are closed, movie theatres are closed, casinos are closed. A fair number of stores have closed even though they aren’t required to. My county parks are supposedly closed but nobody got the memo and apparently the aren’t keeping up the pretense; the usual Sherriff’s Department vehicle was outside the entrance today, stopping nobody.

      Worse is that grocery stores have this idea to give the elderly an hour of shopping to themselves when the store opens. In practice this means NJs white-haired hoarders are going to buy out the store of the usual things before the rest of us get a chance, so there’s going to be no more bread and milk for the duration. Unless I go outside a store and pretend to be a sick homeless guy and cough on everyone going in for an hour; that might work.

      • toastengineer says:
        March 19, 2020 at 9:18 am

        no more bread

        Learn to make some, it’s a fun thing to do while hunkered down and bread is to storebought edible cellulose foam as sugar is to saccharine, and flour is cheap, especially in bulk. I’ve gotten a TON of baking done this week.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          March 19, 2020 at 9:31 am

          Are you engineering toast?

          • toastengineer says:
            March 19, 2020 at 10:12 am

            I wish I’d realized earlier how much transaction cost I was setting myself up for that now prevents me from abandoning this handle I picked based on an embarrassing in-joke from when I was 14.

        • J.R. says:
          March 19, 2020 at 10:01 am

          Seconding this, except flour is very scarce in my neck of the woods. Given that canned beans and pasta have returned to the shelves, I’m likely between shipments, but there’s no telling if I’ll get lucky when I have to run my next batch of errands 10 days from now.

          • toastengineer says:
            March 19, 2020 at 10:09 am

            It is on Amazon, though the smaller quantities seem to be sold out. If you have a cool dry place to store it buying a 5 lb. sack to last you 3 years makes perfect sense.

    • AlesZiegler says:
      March 18, 2020 at 4:05 pm

      From Prague here. I am working from home since monday. Today, I went on the streets in a face mask to get my laptop as a replacement for the one that broke down yesterday and check out what is going on. There were far fewer people on the streets than usual and car traffic is slightly reduced, but Prague is no ghost town. It resembled evening in a small town where I went to high school.

      There is a general order to close all shops, but with a long lists of exceptions. Takeout restaurants are allowed. Day after this order government amended it and added an exception for sewing shops, since those are necessary for producing large number of face masks in a short time. Majority of people I met wore them. They will be mandatory since tomorrow, and I must say that they are very effective at killing social interaction and motivating people to stay home. You cannot have a normal conversation with a person in a mask, and walking around in them is an uncomfortable experience. It is recommended that you should wear one mask for two hours, four at max. In public transportation, as well as in chain grocery store, speakers announce that wearing masks is mandatory.

      I saw no cops.

      Clerk in a shop gave me a box with my new laptop over a sheer plastic curtain. After that, I went into grocery store, which was unusually empty for this time of a day (unlike a week ago, when it was unusually overcrowded), but stocked at a normal level for a time just before closing.

    • Jake R says:
      March 18, 2020 at 4:08 pm

      Louisiana has gone from nothing a couple days ago to schools, theaters, bars, and restaurants all closed by order of the governor, as well as all gatherings of over 50 people. This after incredibly fast spread in the New Orleans area. My work (a chemical plant) has put everyone who can possibly work remotely on one week shifts. We’re going to do a week in the plant, a week working from home. Operating areas have been further isolated with special permits required to enter control rooms. They also just announced they’ll be doing IR forehead temperature readings on everyone at all the gates and anyone over 100 degrees will have to have a doctor’s release before they can enter the plant. Oh and the custodial staff are disinfecting everything every couple of hours.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      March 18, 2020 at 4:12 pm

      Remember when I raised the question of whether it was okay to go to the gym?

      I decided to stop. But then the local health official said going to gyms was okay with normal precautions.

      So I decided I’d go the next day. But then the governor shut down the gyms.

    • Beans says:
      March 18, 2020 at 5:16 pm

      Major city in new England. Everything cancelled, take-out only from restaurants, many shops still open but some grocery stores are ransacked and are limiting purchase sizes. Some stores remain well-stocked, though. All stores still have a sufficient amount of food overall, but the low-hanging fruit and stereotypical disaster-friendly items are systematically pillaged. A week prior nearly everything was normal, had one last night out before it became clear that its time for cloistering.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:
      March 18, 2020 at 5:18 pm

      We were shut down by Executive order friday night. Technically we were shut down Thursday night, but there was enough ambiguity in the order that pretty much all the casinos and racinos in the Ohio held out until they got a specific and pointed order from the Governor. There was talk of keeping everyone busy and employed by having us work on the building cleaning and organizing in shifts, but the lowered cap has made it impossible to have anyone on-site but senior management (who are still mostly meeting in person, don’t ask me why), security and surveillance who are required by law to be there, the OLC reps, and our regular housekeeping and facilities personnel.

      We’ve been promised one more paycheck, through the 27th, and we will be “kept informed” what happens after that. I, and most other employees below salaried managers, can’t afford to operate on that basis, so if I don’t have confirmation that they will continue to pay us -past- the 27th I will be trying to get a job at an Amazon Fulfillment Center (I’m out of shape for warehouse work, but it’s the only thing that pays close to what I make from my current job that I can get) until we’re back up and running.

      The Governor has promised access to unemployment funds and expedited payment for anyone affected by the social distancing orders, but his request for everyone to please use the website predictably resulted in an unintentional DDOS and meltdown, and the site has not recovered, while the phone lines are swamped.

      In Ohio, the 50 person cap is in force except for grocery stores, medical facilities, and a few other locations, and restaurants and bars are closed for anything but take-out and delivery. And yet so far it seems that life is continuing mostly normally for most of the people I saw the last time I was out, except for the fact that grocery stores and big box stores are being repeatedly picked bare and their employees are all being ground into paste by the process.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:21 pm

      I work in a factory that’s current attitude seems to be that we should be operating at a full capacity for anything short of a major nuclear attack, and that we can fully mitigate COV’s impact with “common sense.”

      -Our factory is experiencing enormous absenteeism.
      -Our Sanitation team had its supplies stolen
      -Most of our offices have been pilfered of any cleaning products as well
      -Constant meetings for our coronavirus response, with constantly changing instructions
      -We will mandate our employees take staggered lunches with minimum distances
      -Masks are banned in the facility because they will spark panic
      -Ban all water bottles, disconnect all water fountains, require only single-use disposable cups that hold approximately 1.5 fl oz of water from water coolers that are not usually refilled
      – I work from home a few days a week. This is the “compromise” solution, because full-time WFH is considered too difficult because it would require replacing meetings with emails, and the CEO told the factory management they HAVE to get people out of the building “or else.”
      -Day care is almost empty. There were tons of kids at our day-care: when I picked up my daughter today, she was the only infant in the entire infant room (usual capacity is 12)
      -Really wishing I had some more firearms training, because the tail-end risk of a prison break or prisoner release is extremely worrying
      -Lots of people with stupid-ass “cures” bugging me all day long
      -No supply shortages yet, besides hand sanitizers
      -My wife is actually not busy. She works at a hospital, but they have basically reduced their census to nothing in preparation for the corona outbreak.

      My brother works in a different facility that primarily operates as a DC for office supplies and certain medical supplies. He is basically being compelled to act as surplus labor for the medical supplies, in actual production: labor actually substituting for capital.

      • Deiseach says:
        March 19, 2020 at 8:11 am

        Ouch. That’s a great description of how wrong-headed management makes things worse. Stealing sanitation supplies is the height of stupidity, because you’re relying on your janitorial/cleaning team to maintain hygienic conditions for the workers. Contradictory instructions don’t help anything, and naturally there is going to be a ton of absenteeism once people decide it’s too risky to come in but the boss is insisting anyway.

        The water bottle ban is also shooting themselves in the foot because you want everyone to use their own personal items and not to share them and not to generate piles of possibly-contaminated waste. Masks are probably more signalling than any actual good but a ban won’t do anything about panic one way or the other; if people are stealing cleaning supplies from work I’d say you already have a panic going on.

        The only sensible recommendation is the staggered break times and social distancing spacing, and not having the kids in daycare because they’re germ-resevoirs (which latter is probably more to do with individual parents deciding to stay home or find someone at home to mind the kids).

    • Wrong Species says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:29 pm

      I’m working from home and I don’t have an office or anything like that, which means it’s already starting to feel claustrophobic. My company is fine but I’m worried about my position.

    • Chalid says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:36 pm

      Our firm has been working from home for two weeks. People’s responsiveness to requests and questions has nosedived, but in fairness the financial markets are crazy so that is making a lot of extra work for most people. My wife has always telecommuted full-time, so her office closing made no difference to her or if anything was a bit of a positive.

      The hard part of it is childcare – self-isolation rules out all the usual options so my wife and I have to juggle the kids, who are going stir-crazy because they can’t go to parks or playgrounds or see their friends.

      On the other hand, when I work from home I’m free from the company’s censoring software so I can post freely on SSC during the day.

    • smocc says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:48 pm

      In Massachusetts which has not yet declared shelter-in-place, but is basically at the step before that. Schools closed at the end of last week, meaning my son is home and I am home. He’s going nuts for the little gamified online reading activities his school recommended; he’s gotten 485 stars already! My wife already worked from home but she is ambivalent about her new co-workers, one of whom keeps coughing on her.

      I teach at a private school so I have spent the past three days prepping to teach online. Our online classes start tomorrow. Nobody is happy about the situation, especially the 10th graders who had to cancel their grade-level trip abroad and now have normal school for the rest of the year. I’m not privy yet to the impact this will have on admissions this year and the years to come. They told us earlier this year that the school is solvent and has savings, but no idea how what that will mean. I suspect I am the most lay-off-able member of my department, so that’s a little worrying.

      We haven’t seen any major shortages at the grocery store, except for there not being flour yesterday. Our town has closed most playgrounds, though fields and unfenced parks seem to be fair game. Our local playground has outdoor exercise equipment that is now getting used for the first time ever. It’s like adult swim at the pool. The most noticeable difference is that the local nature reserve is packed. Usually when we go there is parking, but starting last Saturday not only are the parking lots full, but the side of road between all the parking lots are packed. Trying not to be grumpy about my woods being full and being happy that more people are enjoying nature.

    • Loriot says:
      March 18, 2020 at 6:59 pm

      Nothing changed for me personally, but all the schools are closed and all the restaurants are takeout-only. The streets are emptier.

    • theodidactus says:
      March 18, 2020 at 7:22 pm

      I’ll never again attend a class at my law school. As a 3L spring break was extended and classes are now remote. I was just about to begin the job hunt and prep for the bar, but I’m quite uncertain how that’s gonna go now. Taking advantage of the newfound free time to design another game…

    • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
      March 18, 2020 at 7:41 pm

      University of an Undisclosed Location, like all the others, finally decided that classes will be online for the rest of the semester. Campus is remaining open for lab work, though, so at least some of my friends will be back on campus doing that while I’m back at my parent’s house half the country away for what my dad has termed the “eternal snow day.” Dad’s working from home; mom’s still heading in to work (she’s a partner at a medical practice) and there’s talk of whether / how long they’ll be able to stay open and how many people they may have to furlough. Really wasn’t expecting to be cooped up with my parents for the next 2.5 months, but I guess that’s how it is. Threw quite the spanner in the works of “having a social life with my friends on campus”, but thank god for Discord and Minecraft (and whatever multiplayer games I have on Steam). Fortunately, it’s an opportunity to reconnect with my high school friends–to the extent that we’re not quarantining ourselves. If I squint real hard, this almost looks like a normal spring break, but it’s not going to feel like that after a week or two of online classes.

    • CatCube says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:05 pm

      The highways were so clear that I started driving to work. It cut my commute time in half compared to mass transit. It also enabled me to dodge being on a train potentially carrying the ‘Rona.

      Our Engineering and Construction Division was ordered to go to complete telework starting tomorrow, so no commute. I actually don’t like it so much, because I’m not nearly as productive at home. Added to that, our IT is marginal with the VPN being difficult to get a connection and unstable when it does. I tried telework on Monday and it took me three hours to get a connection, probably because the East coast has sucked up all the VPN connections before our workday starts.

      This is a real problem for needing to work on design files in our ProjectWise repository, and will also be a problem for some design software that requires a connection to a licensing server.

      Another minor gripe is I hate redlining drawings on a computer screen, so not having a printer sucks.

      • ryan8518 says:
        March 19, 2020 at 10:42 pm

        Redlining drawings is why you bring home a work monitor and use a wet erase marker! (or I suppose if you’re being nice, put down a piece of clear hard plastic over a screen)
        I feel you pain on the license server thing. I managed to convince our department to let me break the links between our CAD & CAE software about 6 months ago which has done wonders for my sanity in this time, since CAE packages seem to be more willing to let you keep working when the license server drops (although I did it since the CAD license server we had was and kinda still is a mess)
        The thing that annoys me is that now the shaker table is finally free and I can’t get any vibration testing done…..although half that is that the electrical folks aren’t in the lab to finish building up their test units.

    • Radu Floricica says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:18 pm

      Bucharest has clean air first time in 3 years. I can finally tell which cars leave billows of smoke behind – before they were hidden in the general stench. There’s also no traffic. It’s not creepy-empty yet, just at probably the level of 10 years ago.

      Main reason is schools being close, plus a lot of work from home. For three days we’ve had emergency state declared, and today restaurants and bars were closed (most had already been closed voluntarily). Along with that any gathering inside, including gyms and, remarkable, religious service. Last week we had pretty color pictures on some big status priest using the same spoon for about 100 people. That’s finally forbidden now.

      No travel restrictions are discussed, except selectively closing borders with Italy and now Span. Hungary has closed borders with everybody , so I guess that’s us too.

      Personally… I was just about to move from Bucharest because of traffic, pollution and lack of socializing. Had started actually, have the new place up in Timisoara. Well, all those reasons now make Bucharest a perfect place to hole up. Comfortable house, no socializing, clean air, very nice when I go for a ride/drive.

      Stores are well supplied, except for a very short list that’s probably: hand sanitizer, flour, cheaper rice and masks. For food you just need to get the slightly more expensive/bio version and you’re ok.They say the rest of the products are more expensive as well, but I don’t really see it. The old socialists clamour for price controls and rationing. Either they get it and we’ll see shortages, or they won’t and they gain electoral capital yet again. That’s been a godsent for them.

      I’m trying to make a list of things to do outside – now that the spring is coming. Reading a book in the park seems pretty reasonable, if the park is not crowded. Riding bikes or motorcycles. I think travelling in itself is not frowned upon, and neither are hotels. So roardtripts – along or in small groups. Picknics – good weather, few people and no restaurants.

      Oh, and in Bucharest I work from home, so no change here. Just miss the gym and try to workout from home.

      • An Fírinne says:
        March 21, 2020 at 5:43 am

        Either they get it and we’ll see shortages, or they won’t and they gain electoral capital yet again.

        Shortages don’t really matter if it means more people get a certain thing.

        • Radu Floricica says:
          March 21, 2020 at 9:03 am

          Shortages due to price controls are because the store cost of the product rises beyond the price. Which can happen very easy these days just because the supply chain is disrupted.

          If the price is allowed to raise you just get a special transport just for toilet paper or whatever. If it’s not, you have to wait for the next regular shippment – and that’s only if the supplier hasn’t raised prices on his and. If he did… price controls will make for a very shitty situation.

          • An Fírinne says:
            March 21, 2020 at 12:23 pm

            because the store cost of the product rises beyond the price

            Not if price ceilings are implemented, as they are in places like Venezuela.

          • Clutzy says:
            March 21, 2020 at 2:15 pm

            Not if price ceilings are implemented, as they are in places like Venezuela.

            /s?

            In Venezuela they have price ceilings and shortages!

          • Radu Floricica says:
            March 21, 2020 at 2:54 pm

            /s?

            Totally missed it. I’m still pissed on the local facebook comments. Doesn’t happen often that I lose faith in humanity, but the utter lack of economic education… We have a private hospital that started offering covid testing. A HUGE percentage of comments consider this immoral and asked for the government to confiscate the testing kits. What do they imagine happens to a country that starts confiscating medical supplies from its providers?….

            Anyways, on topic – in theory you might try to have price ceilings all the way down, but Europe is already too integrated for that. If somebody else in another country pays more…

        • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
          March 21, 2020 at 10:32 pm

          ???
          Shortages are, literally by definition, when people can’t get as much of the thing as they want or need. Are you using the word differently?

          • Radu Floricica says:
            March 22, 2020 at 8:46 am

            It’s a second order effect of price controls. Very well studied, pretty much always happens, can’t really do anything to avoid it.

            Long story short, two things happen:

            1. Suppliers sell to somebody else. That’s pretty straightforward, especially in a global economy. You can set prices in stores in US, but you can’t force the producer in Taiwan to also sell cheaper. And since there is a sudden high demand, the produce has a pick on who to sell to. Everybody wants to buy. So you end up with shortages.

            2. If you forcefully lower a $100 product to $80, scalpers buy everything at $80, and sell on the black market at $110. Yes, higher than the original price – that’s an economics exercise I did in college. So the stores are empty, it’s harder to find the product and there are risks in buying it. Think weed before-after legalization.

            Strange enough, that’s what happened with medical products last month, because the big players didn’t raise prices. Probably for image reasons. Because suddenly people were willing to buy masks and disinfectants at higher prices than the official ones, we ended up with scalpers. If Wallmart/Amazon had, say, tripled the prices from the beginning, scalpers would have perceived that the market adjusted, and there’s much lower profit to be made – not to mention the risk tha the price will eventually go down. As it was, the risk for them was zero, no chance for the price to go below what they bought for.

          • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
            March 22, 2020 at 11:32 am

            @Radu Floricica
            We’re on the same page here, I was responding to An Firinne’s claim that “Shortages don’t really matter if it means more people get a certain thing,” which seemed nonsensical to me.

    • Mark Atwood says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:38 pm

      “Change since last week”? Not much has changed for me personally. I’ve been full time WFH since the 1st. I live in Seattle, work for Amazon. Chime.AWS has been holding up the company.

      Most of Seattle is shut down, traffic is low. The last round of shutdown orders came from the governor after a NYT article about how the bars and clubs in the clubbing district in Seattle were “packed” for the weekend. Not now. We’re not yet ordered to shelter in place, but if enough idiots are idiots again this next weekend. There is lot of scampering around and getting settled, as people are expecting shelter in place orders soon and the US/CA border will probably close tomorrow.

      I’m fully stocked on staples, supplies, and have full freezers. As long as the power, water, and gas stay on, it’s all good.

      Today I was part of an internal presentation and roundtable about how the demands on logistics, fulfillment, and delivery have scaled up to astounding levels. We are well above PrimeDay overload, and the demand is continuing to rise. That we’ve been able to more or less keep up has been amazing, even to us.

      If you are unemployed because of the current situation, consider working for us for the duration. You are needed. https://amazon.jobs/

      • Evan Þ says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:17 pm

        How long are you stocked for?

        I’m also just outside Seattle, working for another Very Big Software Company. We’re also all working from home (except for my one teammate who insists on going into the office… but hey, he’s the only guy there, so no problem.) I’d stocked up in late February, and made another run last Friday morning; I haven’t portioned stuff out, but I’ve probably got three weeks of food.

        That said, since I’m a healthy youngish guy and (living by myself) I don’t think I can do totally without in-person interaction, I’m still seeing a few of my (also healthy youngish) friends every so often. Nothing like bars or other public gathering spots, though – not since my last library trip in February.

    • Eltargrim says:
      March 18, 2020 at 9:04 pm

      University in midwest state. Married, no kids.

      Classes, previously anticipated to be online for a couple of weeks, are now online for the duration of the term, and possibly into the summer term.

      The university shut down most research activities effective yesterday. I’m part of a particular subdivision of the university that beats to a somewhat different drum, so we remained open with minimal staffing today. Scuttlebutt is that we’ll be moving to 99% WFH soon. I have a backlog of data to process and writing to do, so realistically I have stuff to keep me busy for weeks. We’ll see how the VPN access holds up. Thankfully there were some recent capacity upgrades, so this whole mess is well-timed from that perspective.

      Most social venues have been shut down in my state, which hasn’t changed my day-to-day all that much yet. Been meaning to get a haircut, but I think I’ve missed my chance for the next few weeks to months. Debating between growing it out and ordering clippers to do a marginal job myself.

      Three days ago my local grocery store was fully stocked. Today it was out of eggs and rice. I have a good stock of the latter, but not the former. Nearly out of potatoes; I’ll be making boiled new potatoes instead of mashed, and I think I can live with that. Nearly out of ground beef, but I went late in the day, and there was probably 6-8 pounds left. Lots of ground pork and lamb. The butcher counter was very well stocked, while the pre-packaged stuff was picked over. Thanks to SSC and the Motte I stocked up on long-lived groceries fairly early, so I’m not concerned about actual sustenance yet, only convenience.

      The Canada/US border is effectively closed. I don’t think that’s ever happened in my lifetime. As a Canadian abroad, hearing Trudeau saying that “it’s time for you to come home” was a little sobering. I’m not going anywhere (I like and need my job), but nonetheless.

      • DinoNerd says:
        March 19, 2020 at 9:04 am

        One of my Canadian colleagues did go home; he got there only a day or two before the border closed. I (also Canadian) stayed in the US; I’m in a relative hot spot and don’t want to endanger my Canadian relatives. (And I have family here too, etc. etc.)

        We’re all working from home in any case, and my colleague’s in all the usual meetings, now moved to video conference software; his only problem is that he doesn’t have video, or isn’t choosing to use it – but he’s not the only one in that situation.

        • The Nybbler says:
          March 19, 2020 at 9:11 am

          The border closure doesn’t apply to returning citizens, does it?

          • Eltargrim says:
            March 19, 2020 at 11:32 am

            It does not; we have a constitutional right to enter Canada. Would probably be subject to a two-week quarantine, and there’s no way I’d be let back into the States before all this is done.

        • Eltargrim says:
          March 19, 2020 at 11:35 am

          Even if I did go home, I’d have to stay either with my parents or my in-laws, all of whom are at risk if only by virtue of age. I don’t think I’m exposed yet, but given my situation better to shelter in place.

      • gph says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:36 pm

        I feel you on the haircut, was overdue for one myself but the place I go to closed last week. Guess I’ll have long hair for awhile…

    • Nick says:
      March 18, 2020 at 10:50 pm

      I’m in Northeast Ohio. Last Monday I came into work saying we needed to start planning for everyone working from home now, because things were headed that way, and we weren’t ready. No one believed me.

      On Thursday, the governor started closing things and limiting the size of gatherings. More closings followed on Friday, and stores were picked through this weekend. By this Monday, it was clear we would have to shut down soon, and people were finally scrambling to prepare. If only someone had given them a week’s warning.

    • zoozoc says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:21 pm

      From Oregon (not Portland).

      Work has been WFH since start of this week. Schools stopped late last week and now “everything is canceled”. Stores are very busy and certain items are constantly out. Seems like major over-kill. I mean, we need to learn how to live with minimal transmission and canceling everything is not how to do it. Sure, some stuff should be canceled. But certain gatherings can still occur, they just need to happen in such a way that transmission is minimized. I suppose if there are no face masks in stock/hand sanitizer then that is kinda hard.

    • Anatoly says:
      March 19, 2020 at 3:20 am

      Israel. Schools and kindergartens closed, gatherings of >10 people are forbidden. People asked to WFH as much as possible, workplaces that remain open must guarantee 2 meters distance between workers, no more than 10 people in a room, sanitizing. Restaurants and cafes take-out and delivery only, shopping malls closed. Many stores outside of malls remain open, others switched to online orders and delivery. Government said to be consiering enforced quarantine allowing only food/medicine related travel and essential workers, but so far this hasn’t happened. Grocery stores open, no real shortages so far (short-term empty shelves due to runs get restocked next day). About 10% of people visiting stores are wearing masks, fewer than that on the street, from my experience.

    • woah77 says:
      March 19, 2020 at 4:27 am

      Most people are working from home, traffic is minimal. No toilet paper anywhere. Restaurants are take out/drive thru only. One nearby town has been put on shelter in place. I expect to also be on shelter in place by next week.

    • SamChevre says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:16 am

      Massachusetts, office worker, homeschooler.

      Last week went from “nothing to see here” Monday to “go home and stay home” Friday. My company has everyone who can–nearly everyone, since we’re all office workers–working from home until further notice. I was able to take my monitors and dock home, so it’s going well–my team was already split across locations, so very used to meeting via Skype. I was the hold-out who never worked from home, so I’m learning how.

      Public Masses were cancelled last week, but on Sunday churches were still open for prayer but Masses were private. It was fairly normal 150 years ago, but now is very rare, to have a private Mass celebrated in the presence of a congregation. On Tuesday, all churches were closed until further notice, including for Adoration, so my parish is having Adoration outside and talking about whether we could celebrate a private Mass with a congregation present in the parking lot.

      Restaurants are take-out only, but I very rarely eat out. Grocery stores are out of odd things sporadically (CostCo was out of flour), but I went grocery shopping Tuesday and got 90% of what I intended to get, which is about normal.

      I’m wondering if smocc and I are neighbors–username at gmail will reach me if you want to check.

    • Deiseach says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:45 am

      Increase in number of confirmed cases, still in single digits but waiting to see what happens next. Things are quieter, but there are still people out and about. Some minor shortages since the shops haven’t yet restocked after the panic buying but nothing desperate. Same thing as SamChevre says about Masses, and the Patrick’s Day parade was cancelled so that was very strange for the quiet and emptiness on the streets. Pubs and restaurants are voluntarily closing for the time being. This is going to hit local businesses since tourism is a good part of same, and from St Patrick’s Day onwards they’d be expecting a gradual increase in visitors for festivals and so on, but that’s not looking like it’s going to happen. (There’s one local hotel that probably should close down as it could badly use a deep and thorough cleaning and dump all the old carpets and bedding, but that’s not likely to happen even if the hotels do shut – the owner is a notorious cheapskate as have his family been for years, and the rumours of financial situation I’ve heard is that they/he can’t afford to do a big refurbishment anyway.)

    • gbdub says:
      March 19, 2020 at 6:42 am

      All K-12 schools closed, all universities closed. Events all canceled. Most restaurants takeout only. No TP to be found. Our big defense company response has been kind of annoying, lots of communication but all a little vague, nobody wants to be the one to make a firm decision one way or the other. But yesterday the bosses finally came around and anyone who can be productive at home is now encouraged to do so. A weird mass exodus of spare computer monitors from the building as we were authorized to take them home to support telecommuting.

      I’m somewhat ambivalent, the virus hasn’t hit that hard here and work has no cases, but at the same time we have a lot of people who can’t work from home (manufacturing and classified programs) and I think getting everyone else home protects them for as long as possible.

    • Procrastinating Prepper says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:35 pm

      Working from home in sunny Vancouver. With the weather, the office shutdown and the sudden postponement of all new client work it feels like summer vacation.

      Tried to go grocery shopping yesterday and the nearest Safeway (very central location) was nearly cleaned out! Milk, fresh veggies and vegan goods were stocked as normal, but the bread aisle was half-empty and the cheese/paper product/dry goods aisles were completely empty. Couldn’t even buy flour for baking bread. The cashier said they were receiving supplies as normal, so I suppose it must have been a demand spike from all the restaurants closing.

      The mom-and-pop grocery just down the road seemed completely fine though, so I got nearly everything on my list. Just spent about 3x what I normally do.

    • sami says:
      March 19, 2020 at 1:48 pm

      Philadelphia: schools, libraries, courts, playgrounds, many city offices are closed. Restaurants are take out only and non-essential businesses are closed, including all the liquor stores, which with PA’s blue laws mean that liquor is unavailable anywhere (although you can still get beer and wine at the few grocery stores with a special permit to sell them). Grocery stores are out of a lot of staples like bread and meat, and an instacart or amazon fresh order is usually 3-4 days wait. No shelter-in-place order yet, but based on the critical infrastructure worker travel permit my husband was issued by his employer, such an order might not be far off. Anecdotally, crime is up in the part of the city I live in- Philadelphia has a huge heroin problem and my neighborhood is not far from the largest open air drug market on the east coast. It seems like a lot of addicts have had their income sources disrupted, so have turned to theft or mugging. Three people I know personally have had attempted or actual break-ins of their car or houses in the past week. But I’m not sure if this is a city wide phenomenon or more localized. I have definitely seen some people wandering around who appeared to be suffering acute withdrawal (vomiting, shaking, extremely sweaty in cool weather).

    • metacelsus says:
      March 19, 2020 at 2:36 pm

      Last week I was working in a lab at Harvard and living in Harvard housing (I’m a first-year grad student). Then they kicked me out and shut down the lab. A few days later I found out that 2 of my labmates got COVID-19 (presumably, although they haven’t been tested). But thankfully they worked in a different building and I didn’t have any direct contact with them.

      I’m now staying with my girlfriend’s parents in New Jersey, while working on some Python scripts for data analysis. Harvard says the lab will be shut down for 6–8 weeks but I expect it will be longer than that.

      • The Nybbler says:
        March 19, 2020 at 7:01 pm

        I’m now staying with my girlfriend’s parents in New Jersey

        Out of the frying pan and into the fire. NY/NJ appears to be the worst-hit area in the US (worse specifically in the NYC area, but extending all the way north to just north of Albany, and across NJ).

    • Nornagest says:
      March 19, 2020 at 11:04 pm

      I’ve been working from home for two weeks — shelter in place order since the beginning of this week, but my company was ahead of the curve. Bars are closed, restaurants are takeout only, going outside for anything but essentials or solitary exercise is punishable as a misdemeanor (but probably won’t be). These are pretty much the precautions I was taking anyway, but I’m getting very bored of my room. On the plus side, I’m getting a lot of cleaning done and I’m brewing a lot of beer.

      Shortage patterns in stores are weird. Two weeks ago it was impossible to find beans. Yesterday beans were obtainable, but there was no bread, milk, or eggs. It’s milk that confuses me the most — it goes bad so fast that it’s not like stocking up will do you any good.

      Chicken’s in short supply but not impossible to find. Pork goes fast too, but there’s still plenty of ribs and bacon. I’ve been low-key prepping for a month, though, so I’m sorted — only thing I wasn’t able to find was masks.

      The thing I miss the most is the gym. This keeps up, I might invest in a barbell and a set of plates for home, if I can find any.

    • Radu Floricica says:
      March 21, 2020 at 2:59 pm

      Romania just issued a soft version of shelter in place. It says “recommended” during the day, and mandatory at night. I’m taking this to mean: “if you can do this nicely, it’ll stay voluntary”. Very reasonable, considering we have under 400 confirmed cases (but probably a lot more unconfirmed).

    • Mark V Anderson says:
      March 21, 2020 at 6:08 pm

      I do contract work in tax for large companies. Luckily I got my last contract two weeks ago, just before everyone started getting very serious about social spacing, so I got in a week at the office before the firm decided that everyone at corporate headquarters needs to work from home. So as of last week I am working from home. The contract is supposed to only last until mid-May, so I might have difficulty getting another contract then, since it is unlikely normal office work will have begun again by then. Luckily I am pretty financially solvent right now, so I can go some time without pay if necessary.

  25. Beans says:
    March 18, 2020 at 5:15 pm

    Ignore this: Tried to reply to something but goofed it up.

  26. broblawsky says:
    March 18, 2020 at 7:25 pm

    In (mostly) !corona news, West Texas oil has now dropped to $20/barrel, the lowest level since February 2002. Oil is now cheaper than Coca-Cola.

    • mobile says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:38 pm

      That’s mostly corona news. Dim growth prospects reduce the forecast demand for oil. The price could be a little higher without Saudi Arabia declaring a price war on Russia, but corona is still the big story.

      • Matt M says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:17 am

        Disagree. It was down to $30 or so almost entirely on the Saudi/Russia price war. The next $10 down is a mix between “in-line with GDP expectations” and “a little worse than that because people aren’t driving”

  27. The Pachyderminator says:
    March 18, 2020 at 7:37 pm

    !corona

    Inspired by a subthread down below: There’s a conversational failure mode with no name that I know of, where someone illustrates a general/abstract point with a specific/concrete example, but the example is much juicier than the original topic, and the original topic is quickly forgotten while everyone starts arguing about the example. I’m sure we’ve all seen this scenario play out many times (but, for obvious reasons, think twice before providing illustrative anecdotes!).

    It’s related to the “scissor statement” but not really the same thing. The example or side note that gets the conversation off track isn’t necessarily something wildly controversial: it’s merely a cheaper thrill, a more competitive meme, or something about which opinions are abundant and outlets for those opinions relatively rare. On the theory that more meta-jargon to discuss our own discussions is always a good thing, what name should we give this demon?

    • Eric Rall says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:19 pm

      How about “conversational sidequest”?

    • FLWAB says:
      March 19, 2020 at 10:26 am

      I personally used to call it “attacking the icing.” Because in debate club I’d make what I felt were some very strong arguments and then I’d throw out a much weaker but illustrative argument as “icing on the cake.” Naturally all my opponents would comment on was the problems with the weak illustration and ignore the strong core arguments. Of course in the end I just learned not to ice the cake at all, so the metaphor didn’t hold up since who doesn’t ice a cake?

    • Kaitian says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:15 pm

      I don’t have a name for this, but this is an important and much discussed concept in early Chinese philosophy. From the Great Learning:

      What the Great Learning teaches, is to illustrate illustrious virtue; to renovate the people; and to rest in the highest excellence. The point where to rest being known, the object of pursuit is then determined; and, that being determined, a calm unperturbedness may be attained to. To that calmness there will succeed a tranquil repose. In that repose there may be careful deliberation, and that deliberation will be followed by the attainment of the desired end. Things have their root and their branches. Affairs have their end and their beginning. To know what is first and what is last will lead near to what is taught in the Great Learning.

      https://ctext.org/liji/da-xue

      The phenomenon in question would in Chinese be called 本末顛倒, which in the dictionary is translated as “take the branch for the root, put the incidental before the fundamental”. I guess the English is too long for a technical term.

  28. MrApophenia says:
    March 18, 2020 at 7:45 pm

    Curious if anyone has any advice. My brother lives in upstate NY, and his boss refuses to allow anyone to work from home. The governor just issued an executive order that all non-essential businesses must have at least half of their workforce out of the office, effective Friday.

    My brother’s boss said flat out that he is planning to ignore this and continue business as usual. It is a small business, so it doesn’t have an HR department.

    Any options anyone can see for forcing the boss’ hand that don’t get my brother on the boss’ shit list?

    • Machine Interface says:
      March 18, 2020 at 7:50 pm

      Your brother should come to work pretending to be sick, then closely follow his boss around as much as possible, with no regard for personal space, while continuously, messily and loudly coughing, all while telling the boss at length how brave he is to keep everyone at work despite the high risk of dangerous contagion.

      • CatCube says:
        March 18, 2020 at 7:56 pm

        If you’re going to do this, you may as well just call the local news and tell them about it in front of a camera.

    • Alexander Turok says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:31 pm

      Is he married? Could always pull the “my wife made me do it” card. It has a surface plausibility that the standard explanations(you happen to be sick, your kid happens to be sick, etc.) lack. It shows him as somewhat weak-willed, but that’s what many bosses want anyway.

      A more combative approach would be to have someone else call the boss up and threaten to call up the business’s customers if he goes through with flouting the law. I wouldn’t think this would qualify as blackmail, since I don’t think strong-arming someone into following the law could count, still, best to consult with a lawyer…

      • MrApophenia says:
        March 19, 2020 at 5:36 am

        That is probably the best option for a ‘low impact’ response – say his wife is sick, and he needs to stay home with her.

    • John Schilling says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:46 pm

      First, there’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma at work here. Your brother would rather not be out of a job, but your brother is going to be out of a job as soon as any of his coworkers call the police, health department, or local media and make enough of a fuss. And it’s the person who makes the call who gets protected status as a whistleblower, is first in line for a wrongful-termination settlement when the boss’s lawyers explain the situation to him, and gets his name in the local papers as the stand-up guy who could use a new job. All of which is more hassle than just keeping low and keeping his job, but if your brother is the second one to the phone he gets neither.

      Second, your brother is playing a classic prisoners’ dilemma in an environment where we already know one of the players is in fact a dangerous sociopathic criminal, so really he needs to be looking for an exit strategy.

      • MrApophenia says:
        March 19, 2020 at 5:37 am

        Yeah, it’s wild to me that his boss is taking this stance – particularly since it is a business that isn’t going to actually have any customers until this is a over. So he is making everyone come and sit in an office doing no business for 8 hours, seemingly just to be a dick.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          March 19, 2020 at 9:11 am

          I remember on 9/11 there were rumors of bosses ordering their staff to stay at their desks.

          I can’t find it easily now. But we’ve all known that boss, so it’s very easy to believe.

    • zoozoc says:
      March 18, 2020 at 9:31 pm

      Has the boss at least taken steps to make the work in the office safer? Most office work doesn’t seem too high risk. And an individual in an office environment can do a lot of things to limit their exposure even if others aren’t.

      How do the other employees feel about this? Is it just him? If he has more support, he could talk to the boss with the others. Or at least everyone implementing measures to reduce exposure.

      • eric23 says:
        March 19, 2020 at 1:35 am

        Just spending time in a closed room with someone who’s infected is high risk. There is no way of avoiding this possibility in an office.

        • John Schilling says:
          March 19, 2020 at 8:55 am

          An office is frequently a closed room where one spends time with zero other people, and in the slightly broader sense of the word a collection of such buildings with common hallways, restrooms, and the like. With reasonable precautions, that can be made roughly as safe as a home office; you don’t get sick by walking past someone in a hallway.

          Of course, it’s unlikely that Brother Apophenia’s boss is going to be taking such precautions, so the point is moot in this case.

          • The Nybbler says:
            March 19, 2020 at 9:08 am

            An office is frequently a closed room where one spends time with zero other people

            Maybe for you upper management types in mature industries. For us peons in tech, an office looks more like this, only with monitors and keyboards on the desks.

          • The original Mr. X says:
            March 19, 2020 at 9:15 am

            Unless it’s an open-plan office, of course, in which cases there are likely to be lots of other people there. Even smaller offices often have two or three people working in them.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 19, 2020 at 2:05 pm

            Unless it’s an open-plan office, of course

            Can we hope that Covid-19 will be counted as one more strike against the insanity of open-plan offices?

            And, to accelerate that, can we prevail on doctors to start writing notes that so-and-so has some vague respiratory “sensitivity” that requires a private office? Maybe call down the wrath of ADA lawyers on anyone who doesn’t go along with the program?

    • Deiseach says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:40 am

      Two things to consider: if it’s a small business, will laying off staff/shutting down mean that it goes belly-up? The boss sounds like an idiot but he may be struggling to keep his head above water. That is one thing to keep in consideration: if the business sends staff home/shuts down, will your brother lose his job?

      Secondly, I don’t like informers generally but in this case – if the governor has issued an order, and if the business is non-essential, is there a hotline or other means of identifying non-conforming businesses? If so, then your brother should leave an anonymous call – that’s about the only way I can think of not to get on the bad side of the boss by confronting him directly.

    • Skivverus says:
      March 19, 2020 at 7:19 am

      I mean, given the location of the known cases in the state (per-county breakdown here), the math suggests a couple weeks of buffer yet for upstate (assuming two orders of magnitude for invisible cases rather than three). Rochester and Buffalo (Monroe and Erie counties, respectively) are the only places where more than three people are confirmed infected, and even there it’s less than thirty people between them. The surrounding counties all have zero or one confirmed cases, as does every county north of Saratoga. All the action’s pretty much between Albany, NYC, and Long Island, for the obvious density reason.

      • MrApophenia says:
        March 19, 2020 at 9:10 am

        While this is sound reasoning in theory, unfortunately one of the confirmed cases is specifically in the very small town where my brother lives/works.

        Right now he is pinning his hopes on his boss realizing that this is a potential lawsuit disaster.

    • MrApophenia says:
      March 20, 2020 at 4:38 pm

      Thanks for the advice, everyone!

      As an update, they did finally cave, but only after the state specifically announced that car dealerships are not essential businesses, despite their tenuous claim to being transportation infrastructure.

      • baconbits9 says:
        March 20, 2020 at 4:43 pm

        I can’t imagine that a car dealership thought they would do significant business during this time.

        • Matt M says:
          March 20, 2020 at 5:00 pm

          Significant? No.

          More than zero? Yes.

          (The ones near me are still open, some of them even sent out “JUST WANT TO REMIND YOU WE’RE OPEN” mass emails!)

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        March 21, 2020 at 9:22 am

        Finding out it’s a car dealership is somehow the least surprising thing here.

    • Purplehermann says:
      March 22, 2020 at 4:59 am

      Is your brother at risk? Is anyone in the household at risk? If not this might be good for him, he can keep making money.

  29. Wrong Species says:
    March 18, 2020 at 8:51 pm

    People always joke about what happens you kill a Mongol envoy but you have to wonder why people always want to kill them.

    • GearRatio says:
      March 18, 2020 at 8:59 pm

      Probably because he’s cooking things on a big hot rock like an asshole.

    • Kaitian says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:02 pm

      You’re not the only person asking themself that: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7absmk/why_does_everyone_murder_mongol_envoys/ (unless that’s you).

      • Wrong Species says:
        March 19, 2020 at 3:33 pm

        Hmm. The guy basically says it’s a coincidence. I’m not convinced. Mongols envoys seem to have a low life expectancy compared to other envoys. I’m wondering if Mongol envoys were particularly arrogant compared to others.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:
          March 19, 2020 at 11:01 pm

          The mongols contacted a *lot* of nations they had never met before in the course of their conquests. The average envoy is dispatched to a neighbor that your people have dealt with for decades or centuries, and you will know how to be polite, and will only fail at it intentionally. No arrogance required for mongol envoys to have a higher than usual rate of being mortally offensive. But also, the mongols were really, really racist towards anyone not a mongol.

        • Kaitian says:
          March 20, 2020 at 1:20 am

          It’s possible that some amount of envoys were being murdered all the time everywhere, but in the case of the Mongols people remember it due to their historical importance and the unusual circumstances. If Albert count of Dillingen kills the envoy from Botho count of Meiningen, and Botho responds by burning some fields, only local historians will bother to even write it down.

          • Wrong Species says:
            March 20, 2020 at 5:27 am

            Yeah, I’m thinking either that Mongol envoys were provoking people in to war or that it’s not actually a higher rate than others, the Mongols just emphasized it more in their history.

        • Chalid says:
          March 20, 2020 at 3:57 am

          The Mongols envoys were being dispatched to tell other kings to surrender or die horribly. Most envoys were probably sending much milder messages.

    • DeWitt says:
      March 20, 2020 at 4:54 am

      The Romans, when they didn’t have a good pretext for war, had a habit of sending over envoys who’d then misbehave themselves to the point of returning with the message that ‘gee guys, they just done declared war on us’. This wasn’t a uniquely Roman matter; Saigo Takamori is a more recent example. It is entirely possible and even likely that the envoys were people seeking a pretext for war much more than anything else.

      • Wrong Species says:
        March 20, 2020 at 5:17 am

        That’s exactly what I’m thinking. Mongols sent out envoys saying that if they didn’t surrender, they were going to rape their women and burn their crops and then feign shock when people get pissed and cut their heads off. When it comes to Rome, we generally understand that these were just pretexts but people seem to take the Mongols claims of outrage at face value.

  30. Le Maistre Chat says:
    March 18, 2020 at 10:16 pm

    I am closing on previous home (lived in it for 2 years, blah blah) tomorrow and will net $226,000 cash. What do?
    Our 78% S&P 500/22% bond Fidelity account has lost 15.3% of its original value.

    • sharper13 says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:13 pm

      My reaction would be the Nasdaq 100, assuming you can handle a potential year or two of recovery. If you’re looking for more immediate risk, straddle options around the markets to get paid based on how unstable they are.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:19 pm

        If you’re looking for more immediate risk, straddle options around the markets to get paid based on how unstable they are.

        I don’t understand straddle options.

        • sharper13 says:
          March 18, 2020 at 11:34 pm

          Here’s a quick description.

          Basically you put together calls and puts so that as long as the market moves rapidly either up or down, you make lots of money. Essentially profiting on the instability. You lose if the market stays stable, which is why it’s a high-risk trade. Sounds like a no-brainer, though, right? The recent instability is likely already priced in somewhat, though, so it’s not necessarily as much of a guaranteed winner as it may sound.

    • Eric Rall says:
      March 18, 2020 at 11:14 pm

      Start by topping off your emergency fund. The standard recommendation is at least 3-6 months of necessary living expenses (not your normal livong expenses: you can assume a reasonable degree of belt-tightening if you lose your main income). And some advocate for up to a year. 1-2 months worth should probably go in your checking account, and the rest can go in a money market fund, a high-yield savings account, or short-term CDs with staggered maturity dates.

      For the rest, one option is to pay down your mortgage on your new house. This is equivalent to investing in a low-risk bond with a mostly-tax-free return (mortgage interest is tax deductable, but it overlaps with the standard deduction so only the left-over amount above the standard deduction actually lowers your taxes) of whatever you interest rate is. And if you can pay it off completely, your fixed expenses just got a lot cheaper.

      Or you can throw it into your investment account. Your 78/22 split is moderately aggressive, which is probably good if you’re investing for the long term. In the long run, the market will very likely recover, and buying stock now is much cheaper than it was a few weeks ago. But brace yourself for things getting worse before they get better. Maybe a lot worse.

      I paid off my mortgage on my current house a couple years ago when I sold my previous house. I don’t regret that at all: not having a motgage payment hive me a lot more financial flexibility and is reassuring in trying times. I rebalanced my investments back to my target allocation (90% stock index funds, 10% short-term corporate bond funds) on Monday, and I’m leaving my 401k and ESPP contributions on autopilot. The rest of my income net of expenses is going into padding my emergency fund.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        March 18, 2020 at 11:46 pm

        Start by topping off your emergency fund. The standard recommendation is at least 3-6 months of necessary living expenses (not your normal livong expenses: you can assume a reasonable degree of belt-tightening if you lose your main income). And some advocate for up to a year. 1-2 months worth should probably go in your checking account, and the rest can go in a money market fund, a high-yield savings account, or short-term CDs with staggered maturity dates.

        We bought the new house for cash, so our necessary living expenses are very small. Car insurance is >$495 for 6 months. $45/month gas covers essential errands and even our short commute. Property tax should be about $1,500/year. Internet and 2 smartphones = $90/mo. The only other essentials are electricity (no gas or oil heating), water and Costco/the grocery store.
        Our first property taxes here are due Nov. 1, so probably try to stock up on staples at Costco and then top up the emergency fund to $2630+6 months utilities.

        In the long run, the market will very likely recover, and buying stock now is much cheaper than it was a few weeks ago. But brace yourself for things getting worse before they get better. Maybe a lot worse.

        Yeah, that’s my concern!

        • FLWAB says:
          March 19, 2020 at 10:21 am

          Don’t be afraid of the market crashing further. Unless you need the money right away, this is a buyers market. Stocks could fall significantly further and you’d still clean up long term if you buy now. But timing the market is hard, and if you hold out too long, well…

          I mean if you’re worried that you won’t be getting the best deal possible, then stop worrying. You won’t. Buying at the absolute bottom of the market is like winning the lottery. If you want to hedge a bit, take the money you’re willing to invest and invest half of it now, a quarter next week, and a quarter a month from now. Or something like that. But with things the way they are, I would have no qualms about investing it all at once. Look at it this way: if a store was selling something you wanted to buy and they were having a 33% off sale at the moment, is it really worth waiting and hoping they’ll have a 60% off sale in a couple weeks? I know, it’s not a great analogy, but the fact remains that if you have cash now is the time to invest it. I wish I had cash lying around right now.

    • baconbits9 says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:30 am

      I suggest gold to actually balance a portfolio. I tell my family 5-10% because telling them 20-30% would prevent them from actually buying any until it was to late. Gold has almost always increased in value in the short term as a crisis moves to its next stages, and has shown significant upside.

    • broblawsky says:
      March 19, 2020 at 6:08 am

      Hold cash for a little while.

    • Mark V Anderson says:
      March 19, 2020 at 4:48 pm

      I would recommend putting it all into a good index stock fund covering the entire US market. Stock prices may fall some more, but it certainly isn’t guaranteed. I’m a little surprised it has fallen so much. Covid-19 is a short term issue, so I don’t see it having that great effect on long-term cash flow, which is what stock prices are supposed to be. Of course stocks were probably a bit high regardless, so it might be the virus was just an excuse for everyone’s inner bear to come out. In any case, there is no guarantee that the market will fall further, and it is very likely that the market will be quite a bit higher than now in two years. So I’d invest now.

  32. sunnydestroy says:
    March 19, 2020 at 2:27 am

    Finance discussion.

    Looking at the Shiller P/E ratio and the total market cap/GDP ratio, looks like we’re approaching fair value territory. Just slightly overpriced from the calculations I see right now.

    Shiller P/E ratio is at 23, historical mean is 17, the 2009 housing crisis low was 13. So we’re about 35% over historical mean. The couple years after 09 it hovered around 20.

    For the Buffet indicator total market cap/GDP we’re at 109.2%. The 2009 low was about 59%. Assuming somewhere around 80-90% is fair value, we’re slightly overvalued.

    Do we have a lot farther to fall? Buying opportunities coming up?

    • brad says:
      March 19, 2020 at 4:23 am

      Earnings isn’t a continuous variable. For PE we have current price divided by 2019 Q4 earnings (annualized). For many companies 2020 Q1 is likely to have lower earnings. The way things stand now Q2 is looking even worse.

      For some companies you can make the argument that they’ll bounce back after this is all over, but even so the net present value of all future cash flows weighs today more heavily than eventually.

    • Matt M says:
      March 19, 2020 at 6:21 am

      I am not an expert, but I certainly believe we have a lot further to fall. I’ll start looking at buying once the S&P is below 2000. I think we could easily see below 1500.

      And it won’t happen all at once. The true economic impacts of #FlattenTheEconomy won’t be fully known until a quarter from now…

  33. FrankistGeorgist says:
    March 19, 2020 at 4:57 am

    So one of my quarantine projects is to listen to full albums without distraction, and to try and “get” metal music to my own satisfaction. The central example in my head when someone says “metal” is a long-haired viking type in black torturing a guitar and screaming hoarsely and pseudo-melodically to an adoring crowd, also screaming. I started my adventure with Black Sabbath which decidedly wasn’t that. It was nice, really nice. Sorta bluesy and psychedelic.

    But I will say my favorite songs so far have been Planet Caravan and Changes, probably because they’re the slowest. Have I successfully honed in on the two not-actually-metal songs from a metal band, which points to me not actually liking metal? Spotify kicked me over to Led Zeppelin when the albums finished, which I liked considerably less. The subgenres of metal also indicate to me that either the world “metal” disambiguates precisely nothing and we have to kick the discussion one level down or that metalheads are nerdy snobs like all other people for whom knowledge of a genre of music form an important personality trait. Both of those could be true or neither.

    Can anyone recommend a good guide to why metal is so broad and why we still call all the component parts metal? Or some kind of chronological guide of “metal” albums so I can maybe get a picture of how we got to “let a thousand -metals bloom.”

    Also is metal one of those things that you have to hear in person to “get” because I’m too tall for live music.

    My next artist will be Deep Purple, and then I’ll try Led Zeppelin again, since they’re “the genre’s most famous pioneers” on the wikipedia article along with Black Sabbath.

    • 2181425 says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:53 am

      Not an expert by any stretch, but since you mentioned Deep Purple, I think an interesting ‘evolutionary’ arc for early metal is Deep Purple -> Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow -> Dio.

    • mendax says:
      March 19, 2020 at 6:54 am

      To get an understanding of how genres of metal relate to each other and evolved across time, check out this (sentimental) Map of Metal.

      If you like slower, bluesier metal, check out sludge/stoner/doom metal/rock.

      • EchoChaos says:
        March 19, 2020 at 7:01 am

        This is fantastic. As a guy who really loves everything in the speed/thrash/power triangle there, it’s a really good view of the genre’s evolution.

      • FrankistGeorgist says:
        March 19, 2020 at 7:06 am

        Ah, this is exactly the sort of thing I needed, thank you! I will do a bit of a random walk through this map and see how it goes.

        • mendax says:
          March 19, 2020 at 7:20 am

          I hope it helps. Looks like a lot of the youtube links underlying it are dead, but I’m sure you can still find those songs somewhere.

          And, to quote Christopher Lee, “Metal is not a genre of music. Metal is a way of life. I had been metal for many years, though I did not know it.”

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            March 19, 2020 at 11:53 am

            I’m pretty sure Christopher Lee became metal doing special operations against the Nazis.

      • Well... says:
        March 19, 2020 at 7:16 am

        I take exception to “grunge” being listed as a genre, as if it has a sound. It was a social circle.

      • Winja says:
        March 19, 2020 at 3:40 pm

        Oh cool! Thanks!

        I remember coming across a similar project for electronic and techno music years ago that was helpful in finding new stuff.

    • Well... says:
      March 19, 2020 at 7:06 am

      Metal’s common sonic denominators:

      – Harmonic and melodic minor keys
      – Distorted tones from guitars and/or synths
      – Mechanical drumming

      Not all metal subgenres have vocals but where they are present they can be divided into “clean” (i.e. sung) and [can’t remember the term] in which they are screamed. The screaming can be further divided into low gutteral belching and high pterodactyl screeching. Regular yelling in a way that doesn’t sound like a human attempting to sound like a demon is uncommon.

      The best single proxy for predicting metal subgenres might be tempo. With just the proxies of tempo and instrumentation your predictiveness can get pretty high. But much of that is nebulous because there’s not always agreement between the subgenre determined by the band, its fans, and outside observers. Worth noting that it’s possible (duh) for a band to write songs that span multiple metal subgenres or multiple genres period. Mr. Bungle has written songs that include speed metal in some parts and free jazz in others (example).

      Definitions of subgenres are a constant source of debate and controversy, which I think might be the point. Metal fans are mostly kinda nerdy kinda nihilistic white guys who wear black t-shirts a lot.

      You can also use peri-musical elements categorize metal. Like, if there’s a rock band whose name, lyrics, song titles, album art, costumes, and/or other creative elements around or related to the music but not the music itself adhere to schlocky or occultist themes, that’s probably a metal band.

    • Faza (TCM) says:
      March 19, 2020 at 8:35 am

      Metalheads – especially hardcore ones, especially these days – are a type of nerd. Of course, they’re going to have highly elaborate classification systems. To their credit, those classifications tend to make sense, broadly speaking, so if you’re familiar the lingo, you’ll have a decent idea what a melodic death metal band you’ve never heard will sound like.

      As for why metal is such a big tent, I believe it is best explained by ingroup/outgroup dynamics. On the one hand, much of the community-building around metal happened when this type of music (that wasn’t quite metal, yet) was very much unfashionable and being passed over in favour of punk and disco – and then subsequently in the Nineties, after it had fallen out of mainstream favour again. On the other hand, the evolutionary lines are traceable, because unlike pop, say, metal performers tend to be musicians first and celebrities second, if at all. Also, metal musicians are no less nerdy than their audience.

      The result goes something along the lines of “You like Sabbath? I like Sabbath! Purple?” “Nah, not really. Now, Priest…” “Hell yeah! Listen, if you like Priest, you’re gonna love this tape I found in the import bin. It’s this small band from England, that nobody’s ever heard of, but they’re way out there with Priest and Maiden!”

      Rinse and repeat over a couple of decades.

  34. EchoChaos says:
    March 19, 2020 at 5:34 am

    The media has decided to pound Trump for his relentlessly calling COVID-19 “the Chinese coronavirus”.

    Regardless of what you think of Trump, this seems an insanely dumb fight for the media, who look like they’re defending the communist regime that caused this global pandemic by censoring doctors and other scientists in Wuhan before it finally got too big to be controlled.

    • Plumber says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:58 am

      @EchoChaos says:

      “The media has decided to pound Trump for his relentlessly calling COVID-19 “the Chinese coronavirus”…”

      I haven’t noticed either yet (I’ve actually heard VP Mike Pence speak about the disease more than I’ve heard President Trump), though I have seen lots of “Big list of ways Trump has bungled” from sources that were previously anti-Trump anyway, when I’ve bothered to read them they sometimes acknowledged “He’s on the right track now, but he should’ve been sooner!”, AFAIK they’re correct but at least Trump closed traffic with China before others were talking about doing that.

      “..this seems an insanely dumb fight…”

      I agree, when someone says “Wuhan virus”, “coronavirus”, “covid-19”, or just “the epidemic” I know what they mean, whether the oncoming iceberg’s color is called “eggshell” or “white” doesn’t matter much to me.

      Other than that they closed some cities off a month or three back I haven’t actually heard much about what Red China’s done (I wish I had more foresight on learning that news!), I have read about Taiwan’s efforts to keep the disease at bay, which have seemed to work well.

      The news from Italy is just frightening, apparently being the place everyone wants to visit has its downsides!

      • EchoChaos says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:07 am

        when someone says “Wuhan virus”, “coronavirus”, “covid-19”, or just “the epidemic”

        Or Kung Flu, which is the new one going around righty circles.

        • Silverlock says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:40 am

          Courtesy of the Babylon Bee, I like “Lung Pao Sicken” and “Srirachoo.”

        • Plumber says:
          March 19, 2020 at 7:31 am

          @EchoChaos >

          “….Kung Flu…”

          That’s funny!

          I just took a look at vox.com and they did indeed have a headline of the type you described (I shoud’ve guessed they would!).

          • EchoChaos says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:35 am

            That’s funny!

            And it means we can praise all our healthcare workers as “Kung Flu Fighters”.

            they did indeed have a headline of the type you described

            Always trust EchoChaos brand media analysis. 🙂

          • Nick says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:53 am

            @EchoChaos
            Good thinking. Weird Al has said he won’t be doing another My Corona parody, but maybe he should be doing one of Kung Fu Fighting.

          • sharper13 says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:16 pm

            @Nick, @EchoChaos:

            Wouldn’t take much to update “Everybody was Kung Flu fighting!”

    • FrankistGeorgist says:
      March 19, 2020 at 6:27 am

      It looks like the media is defending innocent Chinese people, since English doesn’t distinguish between the race and the country demonym. I’m sure Trump means to tar the communist party. Honestly I’m shocked it took him so long to pivot to that angle. But I assume he wants me to transfer the hate from “coronavirus” to “Chinese” and that word cuts two ways and people already presume Trump/the right is racist so Trump/the right insisting on appending a race word to a word you’re supposed to hate and the logic seems pretty clear to me why people won’t love that.

      Also “the media has decided to pound Trump” for everything, and this doesn’t seem noticeably dumber than any other reason.

      • EchoChaos says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:33 am

        the media is defending innocent Chinese people

        I mean, that’s their party line, but nobody serious is blaming Chinese-Americans for this, and they are doing it right after the Communist Chinese government started aggressively pushing a “not our fault” line (because it’s clearly their fault).

        Also “the media has decided to pound Trump” for everything, and this doesn’t seem noticeably dumber than any other reason.

        This seems way dumber than hitting him for things that actually matter like not restricting travel earlier or telling the FDA to shut its big dumb mouth so that we can get tests to America.

        • FrankistGeorgist says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:36 am

          Not really a response but the Communist virus is so much cooler, precise, and pleasingly retro.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:55 am

          They can’t go after him for not restricting air travel earlier because Biden is still opposing the air travel restrictions we currently have.

        • Aapje says:
          March 20, 2020 at 4:41 am

          @EchoChaos

          The narrative over here is/was that Chinese people are getting bullied over this (where social distancing Chinese people more than others is bullying).

      • The original Mr. X says:
        March 19, 2020 at 8:57 am

        Eh, I’m pretty sure nobody blames the inhabitants of Spain for Spanish ‘Flu, and I’m not convinced that any non-negligible amount of people blame the ordinary Chinese for the Coronavirus, whatever they call it.

        (Also, I suspect a lot of people who call it the “Chinese Coronavirus” do so largely because they know the media doesn’t want them to. IOW, they’re doing it out of anti-media, rather than anti-Chinese, animus.)

        • Le Maistre Chat says:
          March 19, 2020 at 11:50 am

          (Also, I suspect a lot of people who call it the “Chinese Coronavirus” do so largely because they know the media doesn’t want them to. IOW, they’re doing it out of anti-media, rather than anti-Chinese, animus.)

          Bingo. People on the Right would call it “coronavirus” or whatever was most common until the media told them what not to.

          • Matt M says:
            March 19, 2020 at 11:53 am

            A group of them was trying to get “Wuhan Media Virus” to be a thing for a while, but that seems to have fizzled out.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            March 19, 2020 at 11:58 am

            @Matt M: Lung Blitzer.
            Madd Ow Can’t Breathe!

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 19, 2020 at 12:03 pm

            While that’s true, I agree with BBA below. Yes, the media is awful for harping on this. At the same time, can’t we hold off on owning the libs until this over? Just a little bit? We own them ALL THE TIME. A little break can’t hurt while we get the pandemic fixed, eh?

          • albatross11 says:
            March 19, 2020 at 12:55 pm

            It’s so nice to see that even with half the economy shut down and the other half searching frantically for facemasks, the clickbait journalism economy continues on apace.

        • John Schilling says:
          March 19, 2020 at 1:54 pm

          Also, I suspect a lot of people who call it the “Chinese Coronavirus” do so largely because they know the media doesn’t want them to.

          This, which is the equal and opposite bit of childishness as the media making a big deal out of it.

          If we’d called it the “Wuhan Flu” in December, it wouldn’t mean anything more than “Spanish Flu”. Or SARS or MERS or Legionnaire’s disease. But very few people did that; mostly people just called it “the coronavirus” until there was a proper name, and some of them switched to “COVID-19” and some didn’t.

          Anyone who wasn’t calling it the “Wuhan Flu” then and is now, I’m pretty sure is doing it to blame the Chinese and/or pwn the libs. Knock it off. And, libs, stop getting pwned by such a cheap trick.

          • EchoChaos says:
            March 19, 2020 at 5:10 pm

            I’m pretty sure is doing it to blame the Chinese

            This is good, though. The Chinese Communists deserve the blame.

            This is why Trump is doing it. pwning the libs is just a lagniappe.

          • Matt M says:
            March 19, 2020 at 5:15 pm

            Yeah, and honestly, I think it’s a bit tit for tat given the Chinese are advancing stories that the US military somehow brought it to Wuhan.

            If they knocked that stuff off, maybe Trump would let it go. But he definitely stop before they do…

          • gbdub says:
            March 19, 2020 at 5:20 pm

            “But very few people did that”
            Several prominent media outlets doing that…

          • sharper13 says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:30 pm

            Not to pile on, but the NY Times calling it the Wuhan Flu in it’s own stories and then later stating anyone calling it the Wuhan Flu is just racist is positively Orwellian.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:59 pm

            This is good, though. The Chinese Communists deserve the blame.

            In what sense do you think the nominal and in practice vestigial Communism of the PRC is responsible for the present outbreak? The wet markets in Wuhan were capitalist enterprises, and the Chinese government did as good a job of containing the outbreak as any other I know of.

          • EchoChaos says:
            March 19, 2020 at 8:07 pm

            @John Schilling

            When they forcibly silenced and shut down labs that were trying to warn the world of the outbreak in December, or when they had the WHO deny there was human to human spread in a worldwide announcement?

            Their subsequent quarantine has been effective, assuming their numbers aren’t blatant lies, but this wouldn’t be a pandemic if they hadn’t tried to hide it in the start instead of solving it.

          • salvorhardin says:
            March 19, 2020 at 8:28 pm

            Given the increase in relative global power they are likely to get out of having contained their outbreak effectively, officially denigrating China now is arguably not smart even if deserved.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 20, 2020 at 5:49 am

            I do think the CCP is to blame for not shutting down these wet markets. The CCP has no problem instituting draconian laws that stomp on cultural practices. They let these things continue knowing full well how unsanitary they are.

          • AG says:
            March 20, 2020 at 8:40 am

            Going out of your way to cross out Corona and replace it with China in briefing notes sure is a look, though… Regardless of if it was previously fine to call it the China or Wuhan virus, and if it’s still bad for the media to be wailing and gnashing their teeth over it now, there is no question that this is a deliberate decision being done.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 20, 2020 at 10:40 am

            I do think the CCP is to blame for not shutting down these wet markets.

            You think a Chinese capitalist party would have been more likely to shut down what are essentially privately owned free market small businesses?

            If it’s orthogonal to communism, then there’s no call to blame the “Communists”. Yes, that’s the name of the ruling party. Shall we now blame the bureaucratic failings of the CDC and FDA on the “Republican Trump administration”, which are the proper names for the people at the top?

            Yes, there are people doing that. These people are being partisan assholes at exactly the wrong time, and they should knock it off. And you’re just as bad, and you should knock it off too.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 20, 2020 at 10:59 am

            Wait, what am I doing wrong? I’m not sure what you’re talking about with communists and capitalists. The people in charge of the government of China are the CCP, correct? And they’re letting the unsanitary wet markets continue, correct? I would like them to shut those down.

            What is wrong with this?

          • BBA says:
            March 20, 2020 at 11:05 am

            Yeah, weird as it is for me to be defending Conrad… China doesn’t have an independent civil service, let alone a “Deep State.” Everything that the government does there, national or local, is squarely the responsibility of the CCP.

          • EchoChaos says:
            March 20, 2020 at 11:10 am

            @John Schilling

            Why not? The United States has food sanitation standards and to all but the most libertarian is pretty clearly led by capitalist parties.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 20, 2020 at 12:22 pm

            The people in charge of the government of China are the CCP, correct?

            And the person in charge of the executive branch of the United States Government are Donald J. Trump of the Republican Party.

            What is wrong with this?

            Among other things, you’re making me feel like a chump for having singled out the CDC and the FDA for having screwed up the early testing, when I could have blamed it all on Donald J. Trump of the Republican Party.

            So, OK, it’s all Trump’s fault, every bit of it except insofar as we can use it to tar the Republicans generally. Let’s all have fun blaming Donald, and let’s not hear a peep out of you objecting.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 20, 2020 at 12:54 pm

            John, I honestly do not understand your hostility here. I do not like the whole “Chinese virus” shtick just to own the libs. I posted that elsewhere around here that I don’t like what the media’s doing, and I want this whole situation to be as depoliticized as possible.

            That said, I still want the people in charge in China, which is the CCP, to close the wet markets. And they should be able to exercise the power to do this easily, because they have no qualms about stomping on cultural and personal aspects of people’s lives. They forced everybody to only have one baby, I’m pretty sure they can say “no more eating bats” and make it stick.

            And this has nothing to do with Trump, but Trump does not have control over the US government or the US in general in any way like what Xi and the CCP have with regards to China.

            You’re being very hostile here and I do not understand why. I want the wet markets to close, I’m 100% sure the CCP can do that, and I don’t want pandemic response in the US to be a political shitshow. Can we agree to that? If not, pretend I’m really dumb and explain why not because I don’t get it.

          • salvorhardin says:
            March 20, 2020 at 1:40 pm

            Point of order: I believe the CCP has now in fact shut down the feature of the wet markets which created the problem, namely the trade in wild animals.

            https://www.businessinsider.com/china-bans-wildlife-trade-consumption-coronavirus-2020-2

            Horse, closed barn door, and all that, and it’s also legitimate to ask as National Review did whether they’re going to keep them closed this time or just let ’em rip again when people get distracted; but still.

          • John Schilling says:
            March 20, 2020 at 2:51 pm

            I do not like the whole “Chinese virus” shtick just to own the libs. I posted that elsewhere around here that I don’t like what the media’s doing, and I want this whole situation to be as depoliticized as possible.

            And yet you are gratuitously using partisan political terminology. So I’m skeptical of your claim to want it depoliticized, and if that is what you want, you’re clueless as to how to go about it.

            That said, I still want the people in charge in China, which is the CCP, to close the wet markets

            The “people in charge in China” are the “CCP”. They are also the “Chinese Communist Party”, the “Chinese government”, and for that matter “Beijing” usually works. You can use any of those, and everyone will know who you are talking about. But only one of them, and the most verbose one at that, spells out a political platform that everyone here knows you and EchoChaos are hostile to. Only one of them, makes people think that you are indeed trying to politicize the situation and ought to be ignored.

            Very often, when there are several different names you could use to identify a person or institution, your ability to communicate effectively will depend on which of those names you chose. That the name you chose is technically correct, is neither necessary nor sufficient for communication to be effective. You’re going to wind up needlessly insulting a whole lot of people, and saying “but I was technically correct” isn’t going to undo that.

            And you’ll probably never understand that, so I’ll stop trying to explain it to you.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 21, 2020 at 5:56 am

            Okay then yes, the problem was that I was too dumb to understand what you were saying. I did not understand people got defensive about the CCP. I thought that was less politicized, because saying “China” or “the Chinese” sounds racial, when that’s not what I’m getting at at all. My criticism is for the government of China. Which to my understand was the CCP, and since generally no one likes the CCP, I don’t see why anyone would be getting defensive about it.

            I also largely agree with the leftists who describe what China does as “state capitalism” rather than communism. China doesn’t look much like the idealized stateless communism, nor does it even look like Soviet Russia. So when I say “CCP,” I’m not even railing at communism. I’m talking about the specific organization that is in charge of China.

            And I’m glad to hear they’ve shut down the wet markets.

            BTW, did anyone besides John think I was making this a criticism of communists?

          • Jaskologist says:
            March 21, 2020 at 11:25 am

            The Chinese government suppressed early reports about the virus, and punished people who tried to make it known. Though not exclusive to Communists, encouraging systematic misreporting of reality is a pretty standard feature.

            What term would be considered acceptable to emphasize their culpability, if we cannot mention Wuhan, China or Communism?

            (Wuhan is currently reporting zero more cases for the third day in a row. Do you believe them this time?)

          • Matt M says:
            March 21, 2020 at 1:09 pm

            Yeah, all indication seems to be that China has flipped into “herd immunity” mode and has decided to just reopen everything and let the disease circulate.

        • ana53294 says:
          March 20, 2020 at 9:42 am

          I’m pretty sure nobody blames the inhabitants of Spain for Spanish ‘Flu

          Because it didn’t originate in Spain?

          Although there still seems to be debate over whether it originated in the UK, US, or China, nobody seems to think it originated in Spain.

          MERS, Ebola and Zika are diseases that are called for the places they originated from. The Spanish Flu isn’t. Spanish Flu is not in the same category as the rest of them. The Spanish Flu is called Spanish because Spain, as a country not at war, was the only country that did not censure the news of the disease.

    • BBA says:
      March 19, 2020 at 6:31 am

      If this is the end of America, we totally deserve it. Between a media dominated by the view that everything is about racism and saying something isn’t about racism is inherently racist, and a President who even in a once-in-a-lifetime crisis can’t pass up any opportunity to trigger the libs, we are so fucked.

      • Matt M says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:36 am

        Not to be outdone, here’s “rich guy volunteers to help, is widely criticized for not having already helped more”

        https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240486275892662273

        • gudamor says:
          March 19, 2020 at 7:32 am

          It’s interesting how different our filters can be. The narrative I’d seen is that Tesla got the order that all non-essential businesses should shutdown, so decided to call itself essential, and that this offer to help is to retroactively defend that decision.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:43 am

            Huh. I could believe the battery factories might be, because aren’t some of those used in load balancing for the power grid? But the fancy cars not so much.

        • Deiseach says:
          March 19, 2020 at 7:50 am

          Matt M, I had previously seen reporting on tweets from Musk calling it no big deal about the virus, so I imagine any offers of doing stuff are somebody telling him to engage in some positive PR for the love of God and stop dragging all his companies into a hole by opening his yap online.

          Right now we seem to be oscillating between “don’t encourage a panic by making this out to be the end of the world” and “nobody has taken this seriously enough from the start” so I am pretty much ignoring all statements from celebs, media big names and the likes.

          • Matt M says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:56 am

            Sure, that’s all well and good. I’m just recalling our previous discussions of billionaire philanthropy and thinking of the incentives involved.

            If your response to billionaires offering to help is to denigrate, insult, and criticize them, expect them to NOT offer to help in the future.

          • Deiseach says:
            March 19, 2020 at 8:04 am

            If your response to billionaires offering to help is to denigrate, insult, and criticize them, expect them to NOT offer to help in the future.

            Given that this particular billionaire is Musk who only opens his mouth to change feet, I remain a bitter, black-hearted cynic 🙂

          • Loriot says:
            March 19, 2020 at 8:27 am

            Elon Musk has a terrible track record when it comes to “philanthropy”. It’s all just meaningless PR stunts. Remember when he offered to help rescue the people in a cave with a wildly impractical submarine concept, and then attacked the diver who actually rescued them as a “pedo”?

        • John Schilling says:
          March 19, 2020 at 8:46 am

          Yeah, some of the stuff Musk does is legitimately impressive and some is at least useful, but not so much this. “We will make ventilators if there is a shortage” is useful if you’ve got Star Trek logistics. Without replicators and transporters, great, you can dump the ventilators in the ditch next to the one they’re dumping the bodies in, and the credit goes to whoever started making ventilators before there was an acute shortage.

        • gbdub says:
          March 19, 2020 at 5:15 pm

          I don’t trust Musk to not put a Ludicrous Mode into a Tesla brand ventilator.

          • Matt M says:
            March 19, 2020 at 5:16 pm

            I want my lungs to be SUPER ventilated. On autopilot! And there should be a button that summons the ventilator to my location!

          • gbdub says:
            March 19, 2020 at 5:24 pm

            You have to pay an extra $5000 to unlock 100% respiration.

            But don’t worry, all Tesla Model Vs come with “full self breathing capability” which will be delivered via software downlink in like 24 months tops, we promise.

      • CatCube says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:51 am

        I think he’s less worried about triggering the libs (though he’d see that as a bonus), he’s trying to trigger the Chinese government, who’s running around telling people the US created COVID-19.

        By the way, here’s your periodic reminder that the Chinese government is running concentration camps where they put people based on race.

      • Well... says:
        March 19, 2020 at 8:35 am

        @BBA: Speak for yourself. I don’t deserve it. At least not for anything close to the reasons you listed.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        March 19, 2020 at 9:00 am

        “There are more important things at take right now than fighting about the narrative! So let’s just all accept my narrative and move on!”

      • Secretly French says:
        March 19, 2020 at 1:37 pm

        America will not end, life will just get harder and harder for the median man (I imagine elites do about as well in Brazil or even Nigeria as they do in The West, this isn’t about them), and one day the few who are still able to recall history will look back and claim that we have lost something incredible (like a system whereby basically every house in the country has running water which is totally safe to drink, wow wtf how even), whereupon they will be immediately castigated as racist liars.

        • Winja says:
          March 19, 2020 at 2:24 pm

          I would imagine it being a lot like the average person wandering through the ruins of ancient Rome circa 1500 AD.

    • Deiseach says:
      March 19, 2020 at 7:46 am

      I’m only going by what I’ve seen online, but has there been some kind of online pushing back by the Chinese government and/or Chinese officials that it may not actually have originated in Wuhan? That’s assuming what I’m seeing is not (a) fake/hoax/jokes (b) not some Chinese tin-foil hat wearer.

      I can see why the Chinese would be VERY VERY VERY SENSITIVE about this, but honestly fighting over “that’s racist!” if it’s called the Chinese coronavirus is stupid. There are bigger problems than that out there.

      • aristides says:
        March 20, 2020 at 12:34 pm

        At the same time, my wife listens to the occasional Russian news report, and they are reporting it came from a Chinese Lab in Wuhan that didn’t follow safety protocols. There is a crazy amount of misinformed out there right now.

        • Loriot says:
          March 22, 2020 at 12:04 pm

          I recall the Chinese lab theory being debated here during the early stages of the outbreak. Though even at the time, it wasn’t exactly credible.

    • The Nybbler says:
      March 19, 2020 at 8:09 am

      He’s doing it largely because he knows the media will (counterproductively, for them) pound him for it. It’s not 4D chess, it’s so easy it’s tic-tac-toe at this point. Also as a poke in the eye to China, which I believe is currently floating stories about it being a US bioweapon.

    • Kaitian says:
      March 19, 2020 at 11:57 am

      I can see a couple of reasons not to call it that:
      – The virus is everywhere by now. Calling out any specific country is not useful any more, if it ever was. China has fewer new cases than many other countries at this point. Continuing to call it “the Chinese virus” might make people think it’s a far away problem.
      – I don’t think you can blame the Chinese government for this virus. The reaction in Iran, Italy and even the US makes me think that it would have spread from these places just the same. That doesn’t mean you can’t condemn the Chinese government’s behavior in this or many other cases, but to say that they “caused this global pandemic” is a bit much.
      – Racist memes about Chinese people are pretty popular in the context of this virus. I don’t think Trump is personally to blame for any of them, but his insistence on calling out China is not helping. There have even been some corona-themed physical attacks on Asian people.
      – The WHO says not to call it that, if he’s dismissing their guidance on this small issue, will he listen about more important things?

      Maybe the media are milking this for the outrage clicks, but I don’t think the criticism itself is a problem.

      • Chalid says:
        March 19, 2020 at 12:28 pm

        I’d never in my adult life been harassed for my Asian appearance. The first time was a few months ago. Looking forward to more, once I’m allowed to leave my house :/

      • JayT says:
        March 19, 2020 at 12:40 pm

        I personally don’t care about this beyond the fact that it’s damn annoying that someone asks a question about it every single press conference. However, do you think MERS has the same issue? Why do you think no one complained when the Obama admin used that term? I think the biggest issue here is that it really does look like the people complaining about this are just coming up with anything they can to knock Trump on. I think it will backfire on them.

        • Kaitian says:
          March 19, 2020 at 12:58 pm

          “Middle East” is not the name of a country or an ethnic group, and I don’t think many people even know what MERS stands for. The president also never talked anywhere near as much about MERS as he now talks about COVID-19.
          I suspect if people went around calling it “the Arab virus” the reaction would be similar.

          • JayT says:
            March 19, 2020 at 1:05 pm

            I think the average person would disagree that “Middle Eastern” isn’t an ethnic group. Do you really think no one would have minded it if Trump called it the “Asian Virus”?

            This is an isolated demand for rigor, and looks very silly to me, someone that doesn’t support Trump.

          • Kaitian says:
            March 19, 2020 at 1:16 pm

            @JayT:

            Let’s compare MERS on the other points:
            – Virus is already here: Not really, the large majority of MERS cases are in the middle east.
            – Blame government: “Middle east” (famously) has no government, so n/a
            – Racism: We’ve discussed that
            – WHO guidance: MERS is the official name of the disease.

            So I don’t really see the similarity. You can of course say “names are generally not important”, but the comparison to MERS doesn’t hold.

          • JayT says:
            March 19, 2020 at 6:46 pm

            I’m not arguing that it should be said, there are plenty of reasons not to say it. I’m just saying that it was a silly thing to complain about in the first place, and the complaints only amplified it’s usage.

        • The original Mr. X says:
          March 20, 2020 at 5:03 am

          I think the biggest issue here is that it really does look like the people complaining about this are just coming up with anything they can to knock Trump on.

          Partly that, and partly media types finding racism under ever bed. To read some news outlets, you’d think we were only one inflammatory word away from a mass pogrom.

          However, do you think MERS has the same issue?

          You could add Spanish ‘Flu to the list as well. AFAIK nobody has ever blamed the Spaniards for that one.

          • Kaitian says:
            March 21, 2020 at 1:11 am

            The name “Spanish Flu” was coined 100 years ago, when people had very different mindsets, and when “blaming the Spanish” may well have been a desired outcome.

            Scholarly sources nowadays are moving away from calling it “Spanish flu”, e.g. the WHO:
            https://www.who.int/influenza/pandemic-influenza-an-evolving-challenge/en/

            The Pandemic Influenza of 1918: Remembering the flu that killed millions around the globe

            2018 marks the 100th anniversary of one of the largest public health crises in modern history, the 1918 influenza pandemic known colloquially as “Spanish flu.” The intensity and speed with which it struck were almost unimaginable – infecting one-third of the Earth’s population, which at the time was about 500 million people. By the time it subsided in 1920, tens of millions people are thought to have died.

            There was nothing “Spanish” about the influenza epidemic of 1918, which began during World War I and affected countries around the globe. The cost in human life eclipsed that of World War I: more American troops, for instance, died from flu than they did in the battlefield.

      • albatross11 says:
        March 19, 2020 at 1:00 pm

        Nobody with the brains God gave a turnip blames Chinese-Americans for the virus, but on the other hand, the bell curve has a left tail, so there are inevitably some idiots doing just that. There are *always* idiots doing whatever dumbass thing you can think of.

    • Chalid says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:37 pm

      Yes, our president is a troll, who is focused on stoking culture war as opposed to solving problems. And we collectively can’t resist feeding the troll. We all already knew this.

  35. Deiseach says:
    March 19, 2020 at 8:02 am

    While we’re all talking about the latest news on the COVID-19 front, Irish distilleries are turning to making hand sanitiser!

    There has been a recent explosion in the number of gin manufacturers (I have no idea how or when Mother’s Ruin became the trendy fashionable drink) and one such, Listoke Gin, is turning over production to making hand sanitiser.

    Now one of the big guys, Irish Distillers, is doing likewise in collaboration with Mervue Laboratories in Cork.

    Well, I suppose if the pubs are shut down and you still have all this spirit alcohol manufacturing capacity, you might as well do something with it! 🙂

    • gudamor says:
      March 19, 2020 at 8:05 am

      We did a distillery tour and they explained that new distillers, which may be targeting other liquors later, will often do gin/vodka when first starting out because it has a short turnaround time.

    • AlesZiegler says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:47 am

      Yeah, this is happening here as well. Also, everyone with a sewing machine has taken to a production of facemasks.

    • woah77 says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:51 am

      A friend of mine is in the same boat in Michigan. They’ve apparently been stockpiling the ingredients as a byproduct of what they normally brew, so now they’re ramping up hand sanitizer production.

    • Del Cotter says:
      March 19, 2020 at 10:01 am

      BrewDog in the UK are making BrewGel.

      ETA I hear elderberries have antiviral properties, and they have actually made an IPA with elderberry flowers before, so they should make a scented hand sanitiser and call it BrewGel the Elder.

    • Three Year Lurker says:
      March 19, 2020 at 1:00 pm

      Maybe they can start delivering combo packages of hand-and-mind sanitizer.
      Clear your brain and clean your hands.

    • Ant says:
      March 20, 2020 at 10:55 am

      Even better, an English beer company and a French perfurmer are making hand sanitiser.

  36. Matt M says:
    March 19, 2020 at 8:44 am

    Can anyone recommend some good general survivalist/prepper books?

    I’ve pretty much lost the appetite to read anything else…

    • BlazingGuy says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:13 am

      ‘Disaster Diaries’ by Sam Sheridan is pretty good.

    • baconbits9 says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:52 am

      You want to read the terrible one I wrote 8 years ago?

    • souleater says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:26 pm

      Are you looking for fiction or non-fiction?

      Fiction: “Earth Abides” a PHD student from San Fransisco wanders the world after a plauge kills off 99% of the population.

      Also
      Patriots: a novel of survival in the coming collapse
      It has a lot of how-to stuff in it which is interesting

      Non-fiction
      There are useful books on specific prepper issues, like medicine, food, armed resistance, and real estate, but I would be more inclined to point you to bloggers and internet forums. Generally prepping is pretty straightforward. Have what you need to survive for a week without resupplying, then a month, then 3 months. Then indefinitely.

      • AG says:
        March 19, 2020 at 2:13 pm

        Agree that blogs are your better bet. The website (The Prepared) I was linked to last week (here at SSC) is very good.

    • Well... says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:12 pm

      Not a book, but Backwoodsman magazine is like 65% prepper stuff. And it’s just great.

    • Concavenator says:
      March 21, 2020 at 4:50 am

      Don’t know if it counts as prepper, but I propose Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge, or how to rebuild a technological civilization after disaster.

    • Hoopyfreud says:
      March 21, 2020 at 8:18 am

      I like the USAF survival handbook.

  37. J.R. says:
    March 19, 2020 at 9:00 am

    Fighting the last war

    Once this is all over, I imagine that first-world countries will beef up their emergency supplies of ventilators as preparation for a future pandemic.

    But is there a good chance that the next pandemic will also unleash widespread respiratory failure? What else is out there in the world of infectious diseases?

    • broblawsky says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:16 am

      Generally, airborne viruses mess with your lungs; they have to, in order to reproduce. Nipah virus, for example, is basically unrelated to coronavirus, but still causes shortness of breath and requires ventilation for supportive care. It also causes encephalitis, though.

      • baconbits9 says:
        March 19, 2020 at 9:51 am

        It is my very basic understanding that lungs are pretty susceptible to secondary infections when your immune system is compromised as well.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:34 am

      During the transition from Obama to Trump, the Obama team ran a tabletop exercise where a flu originates in Asia and spreads around the world, and one of the problem the US faces is the shortage of ventilators.

      The government needs to plan for a whole bunch of low-likelihood-but-extremely-severe events. Loose nukes, terrorist attacks, chemical attacks, pandemics.

      You can never plan perfectly. But when you plan you take care of some issues, and have a known response to some other issues that might pop up.

      • albatross11 says:
        March 19, 2020 at 12:52 pm

        Yes. This kind of planning is something we want government at all levels to be doing. I think this is the sort of thing that’s easy to cut because it may look pointless or like a waste of money, but it would be really nice if someone in power had a folder somewhere that represented a few months’ careful work and analysis by a team of epidemiologists and ID doctors on what to do if there was a really nasty respiratory virus that started circulating. (And the same for at least a couple dozen similarly plausible disasters.) And it would be better still if they had gone the next step and stockpiled some supplies, worked out chain of command and instructions for different parts of the government, trained people on their responsibilities in case of this kind of crisis, etc.

        • matthewravery says:
          March 19, 2020 at 5:09 pm

          The “table top exercises” I’m familiar are basically functions of illustrating viscerally to leaders (who otherwise don’t get it) the implications of certain unquestioned assumptions they hold.

          • rumham says:
            March 23, 2020 at 10:47 am

            @matthewravery

            The “table top exercises” I’m familiar are basically functions of illustrating viscerally to leaders (who otherwise don’t get it) the implications of certain unquestioned assumptions they hold.

            That’s certainly how I run them (that and to test the communication tree).

      • Loriot says:
        March 22, 2020 at 11:56 am

        Not that it matters, but I thought the exercise simulated a pandemic originating in *Brazil*?

    • Winja says:
      March 19, 2020 at 2:09 pm

      They’ll sit in warehouses, unused.

      Like all of the Geiger Counters the government built in anticipation of a nuclear war.

      • BBA says:
        March 19, 2020 at 6:30 pm

        And then, by the next time we need them, they’ll be obsolete.

        About 15 years ago, the NYS government convened a blue-ribbon commission on the future of its health care system, which recommended closing nine hospitals and downsizing a few dozen others, eliminating over 4,000 beds from the state. It was simply too expensive to maintain all this excess capacity that could only be used in a once-in-a-century pandemic.

        The commission’s recommendations were implemented and, here’s the kicker, it was the right call. I know of two other hospitals here that went bankrupt and closed since then, as insurance companies pushed their clients away from hospitals and towards more cost-effective “urgent care” clinics and doctor’s offices whenever appropriate. (Nominative determinism alert: one of them, the Long Island College Hospital, was briefly kept open by court order even though the board and management had agreed on closing it down. So LICH was undead.) We really had overbuilt, downsizing and consolidation were called for, the process worked… up until this month when we really could use those extra beds.

        True, this was the product of central planning, but since Saint Vincent’s and LICH failed even with the state literally shutting down their competitors, I have little reason to believe that a freer market would lead to a materially different result.

        • JayT says:
          March 19, 2020 at 6:37 pm

          A freer market* would create more beds when needed though. There’s no reason the US can’t build a functioning hospital in a weekend like the Chinese did, other than regulations and laws against it.

          * Or a totalitarian government.

          • BBA says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:00 pm

            As of yesterday, those laws are suspended in New York, and Washington State is already building temporary hospitals.

            (And I doubt the Chinese really built a hospital in a weekend.)

          • JayT says:
            March 19, 2020 at 7:11 pm

            I guess it was 10 days, not a weekend.

            I’m glad to see NY streamlining this. I hope other states do it as well.

            And I really hope they all realise that what’s good in an emergency is often good all the time!

  38. BBA says:
    March 19, 2020 at 9:15 am

    Aelkus on getting “radicalized” by the complete failure of every institution in the face of crisis. When official sources are publishing “noble” lies and half-truths every day, how are we supposed to take them seriously when they wail about “disinformation”?

    • Matt M says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:30 am

      Agreed. When all major institutions throw away their credibility, this sort of thing is a completely predictable and logical consequence…

    • Incurian says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:49 am

      Yes, I am disillusioned now that they have just started doing this for the first time ever.

    • albatross11 says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:46 pm

      The failures of the CDC and FDA were especially shocking to me, because I’ve always thought of them as extremely technically competent and functional parts of the USG, and yet their handling of COVID-19 testing has been awful and I think they’re still basically fighting bureaucratic baliwick battles where they should be thinking about how to get the best, fastest possible response to the crisis.

      Media from the NYT to Fox have long since lost my trust on any scientific/technical issue, but they’ve certainly been beclowning themselves up to my expectations w.r.t. this crisis. OTOH, there are good technical sources of information. And I have to say that the fastest way for me to lose trust in an information source is to see them engaging in noble lies, or knowingly pushing social truth instead of actual truth.

      And to be fair, there hasn’t been good data on a lot of this stuff, and even well-intentioned experts have been wrong often enough. It’s not shocking that the NYT gets some facts wrong when nobody knows what the facts are yet. It’s dismaying when the NYT and Fox and various other media organs try to use the pandemic to justify various already-held political and social positions at the expense of care or honesty, but it’s not surprising–that’s day-ending-in-y stuff.

      • John Schilling says:
        March 19, 2020 at 1:59 pm

        The FDA is failing in the same way it has always failed, by doing everything in its power to prevent anyone else from doing anything in their power until it’s been studied for eighteen months and proven absolutely harmless.

        The CDC is failing in about the way you’d expect of an organization with a normally boring core function that’s been chomping at the bit to take on Teen Vaping and Gun Violence and every other sexy new cause that doesn’t involve the spread of infectious disease.

        Only the details of the CDC’s shortcomings are a surprise. But then, I’m a libertarian, so not being surprised by governmental bureaucratic incompetence is my default setting. I will be peeved if the result is people demanding more government and bureaucracy because the bureaucrats will be aligned with their tribe’s priorities and that will somehow make it competent. And, yes, I expect a high peeve level at the end of this.

        • Matt M says:
          March 19, 2020 at 2:45 pm

          Here’s our legacy media demanding we not be optimistic about a potential treatment, because after all, the FDA hasn’t officially approved it yet, and that could take a really long time!

        • Clutzy says:
          March 22, 2020 at 1:29 pm

          Nothing about the CDC’s failure is a surprise if your default is that it is largely staffed by the same type of person as staffs most GS8+ positions: what Taleb calls “intellectual yet idiot” or what others have recently come to refer to as “midwits”. These people were almost universally in lockstep with the WHO on C19, which was
          and remains in lockstep with CCP propaganda.

    • BBA says:
      March 19, 2020 at 3:37 pm

      *sigh* Did you read the post? This isn’t just confirming everyone’s hobbyhorses about bureaucracy or media or whatever. Nobody came out of this looking good. Nobody. Not even Trump, although we can’t expect anything else from him. A total shitshow, top to bottom, left to right, no exceptions.

      All right, the Sentinelese, with their policy of never leaving their island and murdering any outsider who comes near, have once again been vindicated. That’s about it.

    • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
      March 19, 2020 at 5:30 pm

      My favorite tidbit was a NYT article that said “testing is limited because of a shortage of what’s called reagents.” Which is pretty much like saying, “We can’t bake a lot of cakes because of a shortage of what’s called ingredients.” Which reagents is there a shortage of, NYT, and what’s the bottleneck in producing them? God, it’s like they interviewed a mathematician and reported that she works with some things called numbers. Do your homework NYT!

    • Jaskologist says:
      March 22, 2020 at 6:12 am

      This reads just like something I would have seen out of the alt-right 4-8 years ago.Obviously the specific details are different, but hammering at the fact that our institutions have consistently failed us was a central theme.

      • BBA says:
        March 22, 2020 at 8:32 am

        As I mentioned above, the author is squarely on the left, and certainly doesn’t think Trump is the answer.

        Are we going to get an alt-left now? On the one hand, the wokies and tankies are insufferable, but on the other hand I’d have said the same about the Religious Right and those who replaced them are much worse.

        • Clutzy says:
          March 22, 2020 at 1:32 pm

          It was an interesting read, (though this article link edin it was far better), but I think it failed in not addressing how much this does indeed look like a conspiracy. The media pivoted on C19 almost instantaneously. They went from 0 to 100 in a day, what was the precipitating event?

          • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
            March 22, 2020 at 1:51 pm

            Perhaps there was no single precipitating event, I suspect all the media outlets (and local governments) were just watching each other to see which way the wind was blowing and once a few well-respected parties stopped pushing “Don’t Panic” and started pushing the “This Is A Serious Crisis” narrative, everyone else hopped from one bandwagon to the other.

          • Loriot says:
            March 22, 2020 at 1:53 pm

            The stock market went from 0 to 100 (or rather 100 to 0) in a matter of days, so I think that is evidence against any sort of grand conspiracy.

          • BBA says:
            March 22, 2020 at 2:20 pm

            The outbreak in Lombardy was when a lot of people’s thinking flipped from “this is just China’s problem and they have it contained” to full-scale panic mode. It’s when mine did, anyway, and the stock market agreed. Took a couple more weeks, and multiple outbreaks in the US, to get the rest of the country on board.

            It’s only in retrospect that I recognize how the WHO has become an agency of the Chinese government and Xi has played us all for schmucks. Chide me for being naive if you will.

            I have no interest in joining the far right because they got this one “right.” That’s like subscribing to advice from a permabear who called 10 of the last 2 recessions. Besides, they don’t want (((me))) as a member, at best they want to “deport” me to Israel, where I’ve never lived.

  39. winston says:
    March 19, 2020 at 9:17 am

    I’m pretty sure that all my comments from my home network are being dropped. Since the account is able to post from a different network, I assume it’s the IP? Is it possible my ip is blocked, and if so are there steps to getting it unblocked?

  40. rocoulm says:
    March 19, 2020 at 10:00 am

    It sounds like the recession/depression/whatever we’re seeing begin now signals that now is the time for the savvy investor to buy. Well, not now now, but as soon as the market hits the “floor” as best as one can estimate.

    My question: Does this hold true for things like index funds and 401(k)s? I’m sure some individuals can keep an eye on a couple stocks they think will climb during the recovery and make a killing, but is a mutual fund manager likely to do this as well? Or will they be playing even more conservatively, making less-than-average earnings until after the market has returned to “normal” (whatever that is)?

    • broblawsky says:
      March 19, 2020 at 11:09 am

      Estimating the floor is not a trivial thing. Even hedge fund managers won’t be able to reliably do it. If 2008 is any indication, they’ll be cautious for a while even after we hit a floor.

      • Matt M says:
        March 19, 2020 at 11:48 am

        Looking at the chart for SPY, the actual bottom came in March 2009. But even if you missed it by three months on either side (for a total six month window of Jan – Jun 2009), you’d still have been in a position to have doubled your money in the next five years.

        • broblawsky says:
          March 19, 2020 at 12:26 pm

          Yeah, I’m trying to work out some kind of rough statistical analysis for timing the floor. I’m expected a minimum 40% drop from ATH, so I might just use that.

          • Matt M says:
            March 19, 2020 at 12:33 pm

            Yeah, that’s about what I’ve been waiting for too. Somewhere between a 1/3 and 1/2 drop from pre-crisis values and I’ll start looking at buying.

        • baconbits9 says:
          March 19, 2020 at 1:26 pm

          For the tech bubble there was a 13 month stretch where you could buy the S&P 500 for 1,000 or less, with (eyeballing) a quarter to a third of that period under 900, and roughly a 10 month period where you could have bought under 1,000 in 08/09, with more than half of that time under 900.

          We aren’t even a month into the steepest market decline in US history and people are already saying ‘buy, buy, buy’.

    • Chalid says:
      March 19, 2020 at 11:27 am

      Index funds have to be fully invested so they will not attempt to time the bottom.

      Mutual fund managers can in principle attempt to do this, but in practice I think most of them are not allowed to aggressively do so (but my experience on this is several years out of date). The exact rules that your fund manager has agreed to abide by are going to be in the fine print of the documents they sent you when you signed up with them, but they are likely to include language resembling “must have 90% of assets in stocks at any one time” which of course prohibits them from going all cash. What these rules are and how easily they can be changed vary by fund. The motivation for this is that, in general, equity mutual fund managers are chosen to be good at assessing the relative value of different stocks, and not so much to be good at assessing the overall market’s level.

      The funds who are trying to do big directional bets on markets are “global macro” funds.

  41. Rock Lobster says:
    March 19, 2020 at 11:11 am

    Are Peter Green purists a thing? i.e., people who think early Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green’s bluesy style was great and that Stevie Nicks came along and ruined everything? For reference check out the album “Men of the World: The Early Years” on Spotify. There’s also one called “The Best of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac” that I have somehow but I can’t find on Spotify.

    • achenx says:
      March 20, 2020 at 6:34 am

      Yes, those people exist. I don’t think they are especially common compared to people who like Buckingham/Nicks Fleetwood Mac and have no idea who “Peter Green” is, but they’re definitely out there.

      The real trick is finding people who think Bob Welch-era FM is the best.

  42. johan_larson says:
    March 19, 2020 at 11:14 am

    I’m hoping I could get a bit of advice about this MtG deck I drafted in Arena. It went 1-2 in Traditional Draft. Mono-black.

    Key: DEVotion, REMoval, ESCape

    CMC 1:
    1 Mogis’s Favor (ESC)
    1 Bronze Sword
    1 Omen of the Dead

    CMC 2:
    1 Mire’s Grasp (REM)
    1 Tymaret, Chosen from Death (DEV)
    2 Temple Thief
    1 Mire Triton

    CMC 3:
    2 Soulreaper of Mogis
    2 Pharika’s Libation (REM)
    1 Elspeth’s Nightmare (REM)
    1 Underworld Charger (ESC)
    1 Inevitable End (REM)
    1 Minion’s Return

    CMC 5:
    1 Gravebreaker Lamia
    2 Rage-Scarred Berserker
    1 Gray Merchant of Asphodel (DEV)

    CMC 6:
    2 Enemy of Enlightenment
    1 Blight-Breath Catoblepas (DEV, REM)

    My thinking is that I’m not getting enough benefit from being mono-black. Mono-anything profits from the devotion mechanic, but I only have three cards that care about devotion. I also don’t have any deep-black cards — BBB or the like — that that really need me to be mono-black. I’m also kind of short on removal, with six removal spells if I’m being generous. Also, in black, I should have more than two spells with Escape.

    Thoughts?

    • akrolsmir says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:52 pm

      Rather strange forum to be seeking MTG advice but here goes:

      – I’m pretty sure Enemy of Enlightenment is straight unplayable
      – Likewise, Inevitable End is quite weak
      – Agree that the payoffs for being monocolor are weaker than in, say, ELD draft — really it’s a couple of devotion cards. I’d probably have tried cutting the three cards above in favor of a couple of splashed bombs/removal
      – FWIW another payoff for being monocolor is that your colors are more consistent, and you can maybe go down a land as a result.
      – What was your sideboard?

      • johan_larson says:
        March 19, 2020 at 1:16 pm

        Here’s the sideboard. Some of the cards don’t fit at all; they’re the last cards of the draft decks.

        2 Temple Thief
        1 Aspect of Lamprey
        1 Altar of the Pantheon
        1 Moss Viper
        2 Scavenging Harpy
        1 Deny the Divine
        1 Thaumaturge’s Familiar
        1 Starlit Mantle
        1 Aspect of Manticore
        1 Wrap in Flames
        1 Plummet
        1 Underworld Rage-Hound
        1 Pious Wayfarer
        1 Fruit of Tizerus
        1 Mirror Shield
        1 Eidolon of Philosophy
        1 Sleep of the Dead

        • gudamor says:
          March 19, 2020 at 1:31 pm

          Minions Return -> Scavenging Harpy
          I’ve never been able to make Minions Return, or cards like it, work. Has it been good for you? Scavenging harpy has ‘fine’ stats as a 2/1 flyer for 3, and will frequently have something to eat on ETB.
          Enemy of Enlightenment -> Aspect of the Lamprey
          Lowers the curve a bit and Aspect has worked for me. No, you can’t always get full value out of it, but even the lifelink can be helpful, for example if they’re racing your Underworld Charger.
          Lastly, I think I’d drop a land for the other Scavenging Harpy. I don’t view Temple Thief as a particularly evasive threat, and you need something to suit up with the Bronze Sword.

          • johan_larson says:
            March 19, 2020 at 1:47 pm

            This was my second time drafting Beyond Death, so I don’t have a lot to compare with, but in these games Minion’s Return didn’t pay off for me.

      • ManyCookies says:
        March 19, 2020 at 8:47 pm

        Enemy of Enlightenment is straight unplayable

        It’s not great by any means (and sometimes embarrassingly bad), but enough games grind out where it’s a passable top end card as 6 mana 4/4 flier (5/5 attacking).

        Inevitable End is quite weak

        I thought Inevitable End would suck, card gives opponents choice and all. But it turns out you rarely see situations where it’s not “Destroy target creature” (basically: you are dying to one scary attacker in <2 turns), it's just a good removal spell.

        On the other hand, Pharika’s Libation is pretty bad.

        • Jake R says:
          March 19, 2020 at 10:19 pm

          I second this. Enemy is low end of playable if you don’t have a better closer. Inevitable end is better than it looks. Unless they have something that cranks out tokens most opponents can’t just sack a creature per turn indefinitely. Pharika’s libation I wouldn’t play unless I was desperate for removal and you aren’t.

          Bronze Sword is also pretty unplayable. I’d replace it with a temple thief. They aren’t great but they’re serviceable 2/2s and they’re unblockable more often than you’d think.

    • ManyCookies says:
      March 19, 2020 at 9:18 pm

      I’d have to see the draft log to give a detailed critique, but the final list looks okay/not draft sinking. Got an Elspeth’s Nightmare, got Gary draining for 4+ and ways to recur it, not playing anything too embarrassing.

      I would’ve swapped out a Phraika’s Libation and the other Libation/an Enemy for the two Scavenging Harpies. You’re a bit light on creatures (14) for a midrange-y deck, Libation is just kinda bad and the second Enemy copy is iffy on an already iffy card, and the Harpies are playable little gremlins that hold a short sword well.

      My thinking is that I’m not getting enough benefit from being mono-black. Mono-anything profits from the devotion mechanic, but I only have three cards that care about devotion

      Did you actually pass up on powerful cards to stay mono-black? Sometimes you just don’t see a reason to branch out, and black’s pretty rad in this format (it’s a hotly contested color in human pods). Again, would have to see the draft log to pass judgement.

      Also, in black, I should have more than two spells with Escape.

      Black isn’t that escape centric in itself, there’s only two real payoffs and they’re at uncommon+rare (though the uncommon one is bonkers)

  43. Plumber says:
    March 19, 2020 at 11:24 am

    Political strange bedfellows freaky virus edition:

    Romney suggests “basic income”

    McConnell says to vote for more socialistic stuff than I would’ve imagined a Sanders Presidency could get enacted with a Democratic much less a Republican Senate

    Ted Cruz re-tweets Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

    I’ll risk the “okay Boomer”

    Strange days indeed

  44. Edward Scizorhands says:
    March 19, 2020 at 11:57 am

    Ignoring the cases of coronavirus, how bad is it to have our hospitals unusable for 3 months?

    I am comparing two situations:

    A: hospitals are overcrowded for 3 months, lots and lots of COVID-19 patients die left to die by triage
    B: hospitals are overcrowded for 6 months, many (but not as many) COVID-19 patients left to die by triage

    I’ve been assuming B is better, because we save more people of dying from coronavirus.

    But might it be better to get it over in three months, because of all the non-COVID-19 cases? People with all sorts of ailments that require immediate hospital care are going to face fierce triage while the hospitals are jammed, so these people would rather have case A than case B.

    I don’t know the numbers to check this.

    • Eric Rall says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:22 pm

      I spent a night in ICU last year. A large tree branch had fallen on my head, leaving me with what turned out to be a mild concussion, a neck sprain, and a large laceration on my scalp.

      The head/neck CT they’d performed on me shortly after my arrival had come back inconclusive, with what the Trauma attending described to me as a “something-something” that was probably an imaging artifact or a benign structural abnormality but might be a subdural hematoma. On the off-chance it was the latter, they kept me for observation overnight in the ICU with hourly neurological exams and a list of symptoms to alert my care team about if I noticed them (ironically, half the symptoms on the list were also common side effects of the anti-convulsive meds they gave me as a prophylactic against the risk of post-TBI seizures).

      As it happened, I was fine to be sent home to finish my recovery. My guess is that had my injury come at a time when the ICU was already full of COVID-19 cases, the risk tradeoff would have been different. Either they would have done additional imaging to refine the diagnosis, or they would have sent me home with a neck brace and a bottle of anti-convulsives after stapling my scalp back together and giving my wife instructions to call an ambulance if my neurological condition got noticeably worse.

      For my case in hindsight, the outcome would have been pretty much the same. Probably for most people in similar situations. But some people who get sent home (or even admitted to a regular hospital room) instead of going to the ICU for observation are going to turn out to have the problems they would have been observed for, and some of them are going to wind up dead or with lasting disabilities because they didn’t get back to the hospital in time.

    • Kaitian says:
      March 19, 2020 at 12:50 pm

      The virus is expected to kill a lot of people. NY Times has a nice interactive statistic:
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/16/upshot/coronavirus-best-worst-death-toll-scenario.html

      Even with a 20% infection rate and a 2% fatality rate, it would be the largest cause of death this year. Since the fatality rate without treatment could be 5% or more (higher than the Times’ slider can go), the difference medical treatment can make in coronavirus deaths will probably outweigh the difference in deaths from anything else.

      To answer your question, we would need to estimate:
      – how many people are in danger of dying, but can be saved by medical treatment?
      – in how many of this cases can the treatment wait 3 months or more?
      – how many of them are actually competing with corona patients? Things like chemotherapy, trauma surgery or dialysis might be able to be handled in different hospitals.

  45. VoiceOfTheVoid says:
    March 19, 2020 at 1:41 pm

    I was unsuccessfully trying to search for something (the post someone made on a previous OT about how for many computations (likely for consciousness, if it is a computation), it is provably impossible to predict the result of the computation without carrying out something like the original computation itself. (If anyone’s got a link to either the post or the youtube video it linked, I’d appreciate it; I can’t find it now that the comment search tool is down.)

    But then I was distracted by seeing in the ‘Searches related to site:slatestarcodex.com consciousness “open thread” computation’ links, between “slatestarcodex discord” and “slatestarcodex scott”:

    how many candidates sourced from slate star codex do we need in order to make this hire

    The only relevant results are a reddit post to r/NoStupidQuestions (literally just that line; one comment asking “what”) and OT116, in which this search suggestion was previously discussed.

    • oriscratch says:
      March 19, 2020 at 3:21 pm

      I like to imagine some secret Cicada 3301-style organization watching the comment threads and recruiting SSC readers for their cause. Normally they keep their communications private, but that one sentence got stuck in the google recommendations and they can’t figure out how to erase it. Or maybe they left it there on purpose . . .

      • Nick says:
        March 19, 2020 at 3:29 pm

        It just occurred to me, has a Cicada 3301 pastiche ever appeared in a Neal Stephenson novel? I feel like it belongs in one. More than it belongs in our world, even.

  46. winston says:
    March 19, 2020 at 2:00 pm

    how did everyone do in covid prediction thread a few threads back?

    • JayT says:
      March 19, 2020 at 6:43 pm

      I said that it would affect me a 3/10, and I’d say we’ve gone past that. I’m not sure where I’d put myself on the disruption scale. Maybe a 5-6? I can’t go to work, but I was working from home a few days a week already, so that’s not as big a change as it could have been. I can’t eat out, which I used to do a couple times a week. I bought something on Amazon the other day that was in stock, and my delivery date isn’t until next week. That was a pretty big change.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      March 19, 2020 at 7:24 pm

      I didn’t post, but I didn’t anticipate how much my kid being home would throw off the day. Despite his age he needs lots of supervision to actually do his schoolwork.

      • salvorhardin says:
        March 19, 2020 at 8:24 pm

        +1, same situation here and I think a very common one.

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        March 20, 2020 at 5:46 am

        Yeah I’m working from home in my office/gameroom, which is right next door to my son’s room. He’s been playing Fortnite nonstop the entire week, and he doesn’t seem to be able to understand you don’t have to yell into the mic for your teammates to hear you. You can call them all bads who don’t know what they’re doing quietly, and they can still hear you.

        • Incurian says:
          March 20, 2020 at 7:11 am

          Increase the sidetone?

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 20, 2020 at 7:36 am

            Clever. But I was just thinking what I might do after this is all over is buy some of that sound deadening conic foam and put it behind his monitor…

    • Clutzy says:
      March 20, 2020 at 10:00 am

      My prediction was that I had no confidence in anything. SO I guess that turned out alright.

    • EchoChaos says:
      March 20, 2020 at 10:21 am

      Which prediction thread? You’re going to have to be more specific.

  47. GearRatio says:
    March 19, 2020 at 9:34 pm

    How do we ever get a good idea of the percentage of people who have COVID? Even now that tests are somewhat available it seems nobody is getting tested who doesn’t feel significantly sick. I’m extremely confused about how a test group that consists entirely of people who think they have a particular illness gives us usable information about prevalence and would appreciate help on this.

    • Matt M says:
      March 20, 2020 at 5:50 am

      Until testing is universally available for everyone (and probably mandated), we don’t.

      All of the current numbers everyone is using are largely meaningless.

    • TimG says:
      March 20, 2020 at 7:42 am

      My opinion: the government should pick a random date out of a hat. If your birthday is on that date, you should go get tested. If we test some random percentage of people born on that date, we’ll have a good idea how prevalent it is in the world.

      Around 1 million people in the US are born on any random day. So that would be (only!) 1 million tests. Obviously not everyone will show up, so it will be less than a million. Fairly do-able right now.

      My only guess is that they haven’t tried it because they don’t really want to know :/

    • salvorhardin says:
      March 20, 2020 at 9:28 am

      Well, right, this is why we need to test a sample of the asymptomatic general population. AIUI South Korea has actually done this. The Italian town of Vo (~3K people in the Veneto) actually tested 100% of the population and got 3% positives. Then they quarantined the positives and their households for two weeks, tested everybody again, and got 0.3% positives. This is the single most hopeful data point I’ve seen in this whole mess.

    • albatross11 says:
      March 20, 2020 at 9:31 am

      We need two different tests:

      a. A throat/nose swab that does a PCR for viral RNA.

      b. A blood test that looks for antibody to COVID-19.

      We need (a) to detect current infections; we need (b) to detect people who’ve already had the virus and are making antibody to it. I think it’s extremely likely (though not 100% certain because our data so far sucks) that people who’ve had it will not get it again, and will have protective antibodies.

      Select some fixed population with little inflow/outflow.

      Let (b,~a) be the set of people who have the antibodies, but not virus in the swab. It normally takes a couple weeks to seroconvert (start making antibody), so this is a lagging indicator–if you have antibodies but no virus, you were exposed, you’ve recovered, and you’re probably immune.

      Let (X,a) be the set of people who, as of two weeks ago, had died of the virus, assuming we test everyone who is dying/has died of pneumonia in that population.

      Let # be the count of people in a set.

      We could compute #(X,a) / #(b,~a). That is, we count how many people in the population had died of the virus as of 2 weeks ago divided by how many people had it and got over it 2+ weeks ago.

      That would give us a much better number on the fatality rate we could expect.

      Also, if it turns out that like half the population has already got antibodies, then we’re in a really different situation than if like 1% of the population has antibodies.

  48. Spookykou says:
    March 20, 2020 at 12:35 am

    When watching a Youtube series why does Youtube autoplay so consistently skip an episode or just put a random related thing in the autoplay queue? I am watching episode 34, I just finished watching episode 33, why would you autoplay to episode 36?! (I don’t actually use youtube autoplay, but I notice it and it infuriates me)

    Tangentially related, is it really hard for people to make a playlist in the correct order instead of the order uploaded, because every other playlist I find starts with the latest video and then goes backwards chronologically, but I have never seen content that was intended to be consumed that way. (Maybe a philosophy Youtube series would accidentally be better off though)

    • VoiceOfTheVoid says:
      March 20, 2020 at 8:28 am

      I’m infuriated that a few years ago, they removed the setting to play a playlist in reverse order (i.e. the order probably originally intended, given that as you say the default seems to be most recent first). It was replaced with the options to loop or shuffle the playlist–both things I totally would want to do with serial video content.

      • Paul Brinkley says:
        March 20, 2020 at 9:35 am

        Lately, it’s been even worse. I have a playlist for songs to listen to while I work. It’s bad enough that I have to click on the screen to confirm that I’m still listening every once in a while, but now it’s taken to playing the same track twice in a row at random, and occasionally just booting me out of the playlist altogether, requiring me to reload the entire page.

        I’ve considered paying for premium in the hopes that it bypasses the “still listening?” hangup, but certainly not if it has bugs like the latter.

        • Neike Taika-Tessaro says:
          March 21, 2020 at 1:14 pm

          If you’re just using youtube for music, why not try Google Play Music or Youtube Music? (They provide more or less the same experience; I use Google Play Music and brief investigation revealed no obvious functionality that was different in Youtube Music.) I find the experience magnitudes better than Youtube. That said, I do pay for mine, I don’t know how obnoxious it is for Standard Accounts (i.e. free); and I couldn’t check (without a VPN) even if I wanted to, where I live Standard Accounts don’t come with streaming.

          Just putting that out there in case it helps. 🙂

    • AG says:
      March 20, 2020 at 8:30 am

      Putting a playlist in reverse chronological order is for episodic series (no relationship between episodes) and intended for an audience closely following the series, watching each episode as it comes out. That way, you don’t have to search a queue for the latest episode, you just click the playlist.

    • FLWAB says:
      March 20, 2020 at 10:48 am

      As far as I can tell the reason YouTube does this is because the algorithm is just guessing. Correct me if this has changed, but to my knowledge there isn’t a way when uploading a video to tell YouTube that it is part of a series and what sequence it is in that series. Even if there is a way now, there wasn’t one when I was uploading and a lot of series are likely that old. So the algorithm is just guessing at what people want to watch next. With that in mind, I find it remarkable how well it does with series. It usually has the next video in the series as the autoplay. It can tell that when someone watches one of these videos they often want to watch another particular one. But because it’s just guessing based on correlation and doesn’t actually understand that it’s a series, it’s going to make mistakes. Maybe a lot of people skip a particular episode: if so, YouTube might decide to skip it to when recommending.

      The better algorithms get, the higher our expectations of them.

      • acymetric says:
        March 20, 2020 at 12:14 pm

        Doesn’t this seem like an obvious and easy thing for the algorithm to get right (assuming episode numbers are in the title)?

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          March 20, 2020 at 12:46 pm

          Or code up something that notices what order people watch the episodes in?

          • FLWAB says:
            March 20, 2020 at 1:03 pm

            The Algorithm does notice what order people watch the episodes in: that’s one of the things we know it does for certain. But people don’t always watch things in order: if they’ve already watched through once they might skip around, or they might get bored and switch to something else in the middle and then come back.

            And the Algorithm needs to track a hundred other parameters. So really, I’m surprised it works right 90% of the time, not that it fails 10%.

        • FLWAB says:
          March 20, 2020 at 12:57 pm

          You would think so…and maybe you are right…but…

          Well, YouTube is immensely huge. And the algorithm is immensely complicated. It has to try to predict which videos, out of billions of videos available, this person might want to watch next. And it needs to pull those recommendations based not only and what the viewer might want but also on what YouTube would prefer the view watch. For instance, YouTube currently wants to maximize watch time, which is why longer videos are now more likely to be recommended. But YouTube wants more than just that, they have who knows how many requirements. So with an algorithm that complicated I’m not surprised at all that it makes mistakes like this.

          Also, I’m not sure how straightforward it is. It would really depend on how the show formats it’s titles. For instance, they could go “Supershow Episode 1: The Battle for Bilford’s Boat” or “The Battle for Bilford’s Boat: Supershow Episode 1” Or “Episode 1: The Battle for Bilford’s Boat -The Supershow” or any other number of combinations. And different series on YouTube will use different naming formats, and the formats may not remain consistant from episode to episode: and what if they have a “3.5” episode instead of going straight to “4”? It’s not as straightforward as it looks when there is no standard for uploaders to follow. And yet YouTube gets it right most of the time.

  49. johan_larson says:
    March 20, 2020 at 5:17 am

    Let’s map the nerdoshere, and start the search at “Star Wars fans”. What groups are one, two, or three steps more or less nerdy than Star Wars fans?

    • Spookykou says:
      March 20, 2020 at 5:48 am

      More-each step requires that you also do one of the previous step to count.
      One: People who read fantasy and sci-fi books
      Two: People who play table top games
      Three: people who LARP/HEMA

      I basically see all these things as being connected to ‘nerd culture’, but with increasingly lower social acceptability, but I am willing to accept some odd confluence of athleticism and interest in swords that produces the occasional non-nerd in HEMA or similar.

      Contrasted with, being really into ball bearings and knowing a ton of stuff about ball bearings, which while also not very socially acceptable, doesn’t have the same connection to the word blob for nerd that I hold in my head, so they would be ball bearing geeks I guess.

      • Elementaldex says:
        March 20, 2020 at 8:26 am

        As a fencer who mostly really does not like the HEMA people (they talk shit about fencers and constantly try to steal our members) I think you are about three years behind on HEMA culture as a whole. Its developed into a pretty solidly athletic endeavor over the last few years, they have a schism of sorts along the nerd/athlete line but it looks like the athletes are winning.

        • gbdub says:
          March 20, 2020 at 8:42 am

          HEMA seems to consist of nerdy athletes. They take the athletic part seriously, and are not LARPing, but they are also nerding the hell out about Renaissance fencing manuals so… definite nerds. But on a different axis. There seems to be a group of nerds attracted to obscure sports (where they take the sport part quite seriously).

          I’m in a curling club and that describes a big chunk of the American membership.

    • fibio says:
      March 20, 2020 at 9:08 am

      Step 1: Star Wars EU fans (i.e. any media that isn’t a movie).
      Step 2: Star Wars Fanfic fans.
      Step 3: Star Wars Fanfic writers.

    • Paul Brinkley says:
      March 20, 2020 at 9:31 am

      Mapping the nerdosphere? Already been done.

      (Star Wars fans probably fit in the vicinity of “Trekkies” on that graph.)

      • johan_larson says:
        March 20, 2020 at 9:48 am

        Who is less nerdy than the science fiction/fantasy writers, but still a nerd?

        • Paul Brinkley says:
          March 20, 2020 at 9:56 am

          Mathematicians.

          • johan_larson says:
            March 20, 2020 at 12:04 pm

            Do you have to be nerd to be a mathematician? I’ve known software developers who aren’t nerdy, though many are.

          • Paul Brinkley says:
            March 20, 2020 at 12:29 pm

            You don’t have to be anything to be anything else… but it helps.

            #yogiberra

          • albatross11 says:
            March 20, 2020 at 12:39 pm

            Nerdy interests are pretty distinct from being a mathematician–I don’t know what fraction of mathematicians love comic books or SFF or go to cons in costume, but probably it’s a small fraction. OTOH, being a lot smarter than most people in your grade school class, so that you’re kinda weird and bored in all your classes and have unusual interests relative to everyone else, that’s pretty strongly correlated with being smart enough to become a mathematician later on.

        • noyann says:
          March 20, 2020 at 10:22 am

          Astrophysicist, xenobiologists.

    • JayT says:
      March 20, 2020 at 10:23 am

      I don’t think “Star Wars fans” can be considered nerds by any definition of the word. It would encompass like 90% of the population under 40.

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        March 20, 2020 at 10:32 am

        One of my friends once said, “I’m such a nerd, I’m addicted to my iPhone!” Oh, no, honey, no.

        • JayT says:
          March 20, 2020 at 10:43 am

          It always makes my skin crawl a bit when my wife’s friends make mention of how they’re “such nerds” when talking about going to see the latest Marvel movie.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            March 20, 2020 at 10:56 am

            Yeah, I have such a weird nerd hipster feeling about those. In high school in the 90s, I stopped by the comic shop on the way home twice a week to pick up all the books they pulled for me. All the Spider-Mans, Avengers, Venom, Astro City. But I would never in a million years have told the other kids at school that I read comics. They would have made fun of me and pushed me into lockers. And I would have killed to have massive budget, amazing looking Hollywood movies based on those comics. And now that those are a reality, all the same kids who would have made fun of me in high school are grown ups on my FaceBooks gushing over talking racoon superheroes. On the one hand…”wtf you people?” and on the other, “great, I’m glad this exists and you like it too..?”

          • JayT says:
            March 20, 2020 at 11:29 am

            Yeah, I’m the exact same. I’m happy that the MCU movies are so popular because it means I get a lot more content that I enjoy. It’s just that it comes with all the “cool kids” talking about how they’ve been nerds their whole lives, when they aren’t now, and never have been.

      • johan_larson says:
        March 20, 2020 at 12:07 pm

        By “Star Wars fans”, I meant people who are really into the series and the universe, not people who watch and like an occasional movie. You’re not a football fan if you only watch the Super Bowl.

      • Tarpitz says:
        March 21, 2020 at 11:10 am

        For both Star Wars and Marvel, it seems to me highly relevant to draw the distinction between people who have seen (and even liked) the films and fans. Endgame as best I can tell seems to have sold something like 100 million tickets, Star Wars 178 million (second only to Gone with the Wind) but both those totals will include a lot of people who saw it because they happened to fancy a trip to the movies that weekend, or to see what the fuss was about, and some people who saw it 18 times because it was the defining experience of their lives, or who have consumed every shred of content related to the universe that exists in any medium and for whom these stories are a central part of their lives (and of course many people in between).

        I have seen each of the original Star Wars trilogy more than ten times (I think perhaps twice each as an adult); I’ve seen each of the prequels at least twice and each sequel and spinoff except the most recent at least once. I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing a variety of Star Wars computer games, and some amount of time as a child playing pen and paper Star Wars Roleplay. I do a pretty good Palpatine impression. And I categorically would not consider myself a Star Wars fan. I think some of the content is good (New Hope, Empire, Rogue One) and most of it is not, but it isn’t in any way an important part of my identity. I would never dream of going to a Star Wars con, and feel no urge to inflict the presumably execrable prose of EU novels on myself. I don’t hang out on Star Wars subreddits, and I’ve no desire to.

        I’ve eaten a lot of McDonalds in my life, but that doesn’t make me a Maccy-D’s fan either.

        I submit that actual Star Wars fandom remains the province of nerds (and perhaps children, for whom fandom in general is less inherently nerdy). Marvel fandom too. Come to that, an actual McDonalds fan, who followed the vagaries of their limited edition burgers with obsessive interest, perhaps, would also be a nerd.

        • Matt M says:
          March 21, 2020 at 11:13 am

          If you can see a picture and correctly name Darth Vader, you’ve seen the films.

          If you can see a picture and correctly name Mace Windu (NOT Samuel L. Jackson) you’re a fan.