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If lockdowns go on long enough, are price gouging laws likely to starve us all to death?
It seems likely that the real costs of producing almost everything have and will continue to rise throughout lockdowns and other responses to the epidemic. Every essential industry uses products and services from
many “nonessential” industries and will have to substitute. The government will work hard to prevent the cost of labor or general price level from falling. And it is illegal in most places to raise prices on essential items more than 10-15% in an emergency.
I’m extremely confident that America could feed itself just fine under these conditions at, say, twice the normal cost of food. But if this won’t be permitted, won’t marginal producers gradually shut down as they find sales at their previous prices unprofitable? At first the empty store shelves would be blamed on hoarding, but eventually everyone’s stockpile is depleted and the shelves are still empty. Or all the food is going to Arizona, the only state I could find without a price gouging law. There are big lags in this system and we have just seen a demonstration of how good governments are at dealing with large control lags.
If people start actually starving, they’ll start rationing food.
This isn’t simple to implement and some juristictions will probably bungle it.
But it’s a pretty standard response to emergency/war conditions and manages to mitigate the worst of price rises and shortages.
Not that I haven’t mail-ordered a bunch of vegetable seeds just in case.
By the time anyone is starving, it is much too late to produce enough food. “Rationing” can’t help with that.
If people start actually starving, they’ll start stockpiling food to a degree that makes what we have now seem like a joke.
Agree. We will definitely see police-and-military-enforced rationing before we see a repeal of price gouging laws.
There is likely to be some disruption of food production and distribution, but there is a lot of slack in the system. The North American food industry produces more than 3500 calories per person per day. We could drop to half of that for months on end and be cranky but just fine.
Oh my God – this.
And what percentage of that is doritos, pepsi cola, and snickers bars?
All food is not equally nourishing, and all capital is not homogeneous. If we see a significant disruption to our ability to produce meat, vegetables, dairy products, and grains, all the candy factories in the world aren’t going to be super helpful…
It seems likely that the real costs of producing bulk foodstuffs will not increase substantially in the coming year; agriculture and its supporting industries are exempt from the lockdowns, and it will probably take more than a year for secondary and tertiary effects (e.g. shortages of spare parts for the factory that makes spare parts for tractors) to work through the system. Plus, farmers are good at improvising.
The cost of turning truckloads of flour, sugar, etc, into colorful packages of brand-name breakfast cereal may increase dramatically, but nobody is going to starve because they had to eat Government-Os instead of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. If there’s enough commodity foodstuffs in Kansas, turning that into bland edibles delivered everywhere else is something that military logisticians and even government bureaucrats can do well enough to avoid actual mass starvation.
Unfortunately, moving back away from ‘bland edibles’ takes decades.
(See: postwar British cuisine)
A major effect is the prevention of migration. Agricultural seasonal workers tend to be immigrants, or at least migrate from other regions of the country. In a lockdown, that’s complicated.
Wheat and maize, which are collected by huge tractors with little human labor will be fine. Fruit and veg, which need human workers, won’t be fine.
“Fortunately”, fruits and vegetables make up a small enough portion of the typical American diet that shortages there are unlikely to have catastrophic effects. Well, no more so than the unhealthiness of the American diet has already had.
Also, ISTR that the labor costs of agriculture aren’t all that large of a fraction of the total price of the products in the stores. If farmers must pay 2x as much to get their strawberries picked, the price will rise, but it’s not like strawberries will become unattainable or cost $20/lb or anything. Probably the price will end up going up by 20-30%, and while that’s annoying, it’s not going to lead to some kind of disaster.
If farmers must pay 2x as much to get their strawberries picked, the price will rise, but it’s not like strawberries will become unattainable or cost $20/lb or anything.
The idiotic way the quarantine has been imposed in Spain makes me doubt that temporary agricultural workers will be allowed to go out of home.
Current measures prevent not just foreign migration, but people from another region within the same country going to another region.
People are so desperate to get an excuse to get out of home that you probably won’t need to pay them double, you just need to give them a piece of paper that gives them a legitimate reason to get out of home. And you could get non-inmigrant city dwellers who’ve been stuck in tiny apartments for more than a month to go to the countryside to pick strawberries, if it gets them some freedom. I know of a family of five in Sicily, where they take turns go shopping, which means they only get to go out once every five weeks. I’m sure you could recruit them to go out and pick some apples.
But I doubt the government will make those documents for temp agri workers.
I hope the US government is either more competent or the US constitution is stronger than in Spain and Italy, where people have been put in home confinement.
Could you give an example of a business sector that would impact food production/distribution that isn’t being treated as essential?
Do American price gouging laws prevent any and all increases in nominal prices of food? That seems unlikely.
I believe the laws say “once a state of emergency is declared, prices cannot rise by more than 10%” or something like that.
If the new market clearing price for food is well above +10%, the laws will continue to cause shortages.
And of course this is all in nominal terms.
See the current situation with toilet paper, Chlorox wipes, hand sanitizer, shopping delivery services, etc. If they raised their prices until the shelves stopped being picked bare, those things would be on the shelves of the local stores. Make a $5 bottle of hand sanitizer cost $10, and people will buy fewer of them. Even people who want to make sure they have plenty will only buy one because it’s too damned pricey to buy two.
There is no federal law against price gouging and state laws vary in their applicability – whether to all goods and services or specific ones, and whether during declared emergencies or vaguely specified “periods of market disruption” – and on whether gouging is defined as an increase of a given percentage or just “excessively high” prices to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Usually there is an exception for when the seller is just passing along price increases from higher up in the supply chain.
There are enough gaps, and enough states without any gouging laws, that these laws themselves are unlikely to cause any real disruption to the market. At most you’ll see wholesalers quietly moving their operations to Nevada and New Hampshire. Then everything will be clean and legal.
These laws are stupid and should be repealed, but I expect toilet paper is just as hard to come by in Ohio and Washington State (yes, really, hard-left Seattle has no gouging law) as everywhere else.
I wonder if they food producers could get away with charging the same old price on their products, but then introducing the “gourmet” version that is nominally different with nicer packaging for a higher price.Keep selling the “normal” version, but less of it, and make it up on the higher priced version that people will buy when the normal one sells out.
As a data point, the rather pricey Bath and Body Works hand sanitizers were still available around here when all the other stores were out.
The last time I was caught unprepared for an oncoming hurricane, Fiji bottled water was the only kind still available… but it was available.
I think that’s how Home Depot plans for disasters.
Normal generator: $900
Deluxe generator with stainless steels parts: $2000
The Deluxe is better in every way, but not 2x better.
In other not-too-unrelated news, drive-in protesting has now become a thing. Sounds so effective that I’m curious why it hasn’t bee done until now. If governments get too stupid about what they do, that WILL get out of hand fast. I think hungry people would throw out their governors and most blatantly corrupt business leaders, as well as buy seeds to plant and barter food, before they go taring up farms. Arizona can also only buy so much food. I think if too many people focus on profit as a motive, it will quickly be to their detriment, because having that money is going to start to form a cross hair on their foreheads if things get really bad.
A smart farmer would give up on profits to the detriment of the value of the USD before it got that bad, and they would happily maintain their place, land, health, and even build some authority by dedicating some years to making food to survive on and give away the excess. That reality is one that few economists ever take into consideration, that people can always just cooperate more and be better off for it.
Our alien friends would like your help in distributing one trillion dollars. They want it divided into one million portions of one million dollars each, and distributed to one million deserving people, each of whom gets one portion. What one million people should get a fun surprise?
And those of you worried about inflation can just relax. The aliens got this trillion the honest way, by peddling wonder-drugs to the natives of a backward planet. It turns out it’s not at all difficult to get people to give you money when you are selling a little green pill that’s like a perfect combination of Viagra, amyl nitrite, and PCP: one dose and you can sex like a stallion ’til dawn, even if you’re seventy. Side effects may include exhaustion, soreness of the glans, and divorce. Ask your doctor if GreenLight is right for you.
I pick the one million top supporters of (insert my favorite charities here). That way it’ll go to do somewhere close to the most good.
I define drama in this context as being a personal conflict.
There was drama in a discord space that I experienced of late. I was criticized for my role in it, so I attempted to make the conversation easier by changing the topic to a metadrama conversation. That proved futile as backlash effects were already in full force, but it got me thinking about how to frame all metadrama strategies. I came up with the following.
Strategic responses to percieved drama:
(1) Is the strategy of being silent in response to drama.
(2) Is a dynamic group method that responds with a third party to help alleviate drama. It takes the general agreement from a community to abide by it for it to be effective in the face of any drama. One such method I know has been proven as optimal in psychological studies.
(3) Is expressing your emotions as they are in full in response to drama. This is my strategic choice in an environment where (2) is not established and where no skills that I have in promoting (2) come to mind… I really like (2).
(4) Is the method where someone pretends to advocate for (1) but still comes into the conversation to tell someone who used (3) that they should have used (1). It’s self-contradictory. It’s oddly popular too, even among fellow rationalists.
A friend suggested that this space would be a good one for helping to build on this idea. Is there a general category that I missed? What do you think of this structure? I strongly disagree with (4) and feel pity and disappointment in my fellow human beings who are quite confident that they are making sense by it. It amounts to shouting, “STFU!!!” because you want to avoid drama at all costs.
(1) By contrast, means never letting yourself be heard. Your feelings can never be acknowledged and you can never learn from other’s responses to those feelings as a result.
Therefore, I so far reject (1) and (4), though I can maintain some respect and understanding to those who are genuinely acting with (1)… even if I can mostly never tell who they are because they are silent.
(3) and (2) are strategies that I flip between depending on if the social space is one that is more feral or tamed respectively. I’d prefer a skillset that could make (2) my strategy regardless, but if the social norm is to shame anyone who shows feelings, then punishing them with what they fear most seems like a better chance at dissuading them from shaming the next person who violates their irrational sensitivities .
An example of the feral-leaning environment would be where it’s seen as common for an individual to complain that a conversation was derailed by a question of clarification, only to return to calling their opposition’s argument pathetic and demanding they be more convincing when given back the floor.
My policy is to not participate in internet drama, because it takes a lot of emotional energy and does not produce good outcomes. (ie, of the past times when I’ve been involved in internet drama, zero percent of them have led to de-escalating the conflict and returning to having a pleasant place to interact with people.)
I suppose you’d describe that as a (1).
My related policy is to only participate anonymously in internet communities, because that makes it less likely for drama to happen. Friendships should be person-to-person connections, not person-to-internet-community connections.
Assumimg that meands that you disapprove of (3), would you reject a community that optimizesfor (2)?
(2) sounds like in theory a good idea; the hard part would be to find a trusted third party. Mediating online drama is a lot of work and is emotionally quite stressful, and it’s hard to imagine someone volunteering to do it.
But if the community can make it work, more power to them.
Ideally:
A) Don’t get involved in an argument between individuals.
B) Except to ask each of them what the issue is. Full stop (don’t ask follow ups, don’t interrogate).
I believe that a lot of time drama escalates due to unstated motivators. Having these motivators explicitly stated is unlikely to do additional harm, and may help.
At any rate, asking a simple question and then staying out of the way won’t escalate the situation by dragging another party into it.
If you aren’t one of the immediate parties, why should you be heard? That’s like sticking your neck over your neighbor’s fence and telling the husband and wife how they should raise their children.
I truly don’t understand what you are saying here. What is “what they fear most”, and how are you punishing them with that? Are you saying that the antagonists in this conflict fear expressions of feelings (due to the existence of the social norm)? How do you know this for the particular antagonists? Perhaps they think the social norm is bunk and actually get a psychological boost from the expression of emotions.
Still reading your reply, but there’s a misunderstanding here. Someone would operate by (2) As being triggered by the drama and thus made a part of it OR they would be a third party moderator of a sort.
For example, if 1st party offended 2nd party, then 2nd and 3rd party could talk it out and determine how to best respond to 1st party in a way that respects and acknowledges 1st party AND 2nd party. Hugs could be literal or metaphorical depending on what everyone’s comfortable with. A lesser degree of this strategy would be if 2nd party confronted 1st party socratically and with “I feel” statements.
I hate when people butt into my one-on-ones. This strategy seems like it would just make things worse.
Number 1, staying silent is your best strategy if you’re low status, because if you engage in 3, then either someone will use 4 on you or the third party in 2 will effectively come down against you. Lots of ways this last can happen; the third party can declare a pox on both sides but then enforce it only on you. They can appeal to your sense of responsibility to follow their decision while excusing the other party’s violations. They can openly come down against you.
Number 3 is the best strategy if you’re somewhat high status, because others will chime in to help (as in 4) and any third party will likely assist you.
If you’re very high status, you’re the third party and you can pick and choose winners as you care to.
Status is a good topic to consider here, as is applies to the general nature of heirarchy. I tend to reject status as a consideration, as I push for equality. I acknowledge the existence of social status, but it seems irrational to me beyond the need for a lead position to make quick decisions in a group. Outside of that it’s a bit more like microclassism in my view.
If a third party backlash effects on an offended 2nd party in respose to their use of (3), I would think it would be a false sense of (2) as a strategy on the 3rd party’s part. This is good feed back. I think it means I should add a (5) that considers collective attacking of the offender, often suffering from the backlash effect to the offense and thus charging at the offender collectively with pitchforks as it were. Either that or it would count as a (3) or (4) response to another (3) response that you are describing if no new category is needed. I like the distinction of collective groupthink as a factor if nothing else.
Alright, someone has to say it. There is a pretty good chance that this, and the general attitude that gives rise to it, is quite likely the issue. This apparent attitude of superior smugness most likely bled into your communications about the issue early on, and you are going to struggle to recover from that.
Just to be sure, you are not invalidating the genuine feeling of being disappointed that people can’t be rational about something obvious to one’s own perspective, right?
The statement in question is one of me expressing a genuine feeling in this space. It was not stated outright in the other space. Therefore, it would make little sense to say that a statement of such in particular conveyed a sense of superior smugness to the others there.
Do you find it most likely that smug superiority, if not charitable, is the state of mind of someone who conveys a sense of pity and disappointment toward another person for being self-contradictory or irrational? Do you see no alternative or charitable interpretation?
Has anyone changed any of their political views because of the Coronavirus?
I don’t think it’s appropriate to update that fast, but I think Trump is worse for the United States than I did in January. But the Democrats lauding Gov. “stay at home while 40-80% of you take your turns getting the coronavirus” Cuomo makes me skeptical that rulers from the other Party could have saved us. The rulers of Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea are looking good, but they still have time to reveal incompetence: after all, on March 28 Prime Minister Abe of Japan still looks good for doing almost nothing.
Arguably, having already build a system resilient to Covid is the best thing one could have done. We’re going to see a lot of leaders (and countries, and government systems) scoring points for being decisive in a crisis while they actually had a shit system in the first place that made the size of the crisis possible.
Abe quarantined Diamond Princess and closed schools on 27 February. That is not nothing. He was way ahead of the curve compared to leaders of both US and EU.
I now view competence at management and leadership as much more important than I did three months ago. I haven’t determined how much to weigh it against other qualities, but that’d probably depend on the individual candidates. (For a reducto ad absurdam: I’d vote for the incompetent and literally insane Paul Deschanel over an AU!Competent!Hitler.)
This seems too opaque in politicians to be useful. Does Justin Trudeau have orders of magnitude more managerial competence than Donald Trump? A leftist would say “Of course!”, but how do we know that community transmission didn’t just start later in Canada? And how could anyone have predicted ahead of time that Justin Trudeau possesses so vastly greater managerial competence than leftists in other cultures? PM Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón leads the Socialist Workers’ Party and Spain is a deadly basket case.
@Le Maistre Chat
Yeap yeap. Plus, it’s doubtful one single person can manage the whole debacle. I think a more subtle set of skills is necessary: finding the right people to put in charge, leading everybody in more or less the same direction, correctly finding the moments when you need to intervene with a big hammer (in US that’s mostly to hit FDA) and so on.
Type in ‘Canada’ [Ret] ‘USA’ [Ret] in the search field, and you will see that death rates follow almost exactly the same exponential growth, doubling every three days. Obviously, deaths lag infections by something like 1-3 weeks (anybody got hard numbers?), so more recent measures have yet to take effect. The US is certainly doing an impressive job of testing people.
https://www.vg.no/spesial/2020/corona/?utm_source=corona-widget&utm_term=d6&utm_source=vgfront&utm_content=row-3#verden-vekst-i-dodsfall
I was a pretty dyed-in-the-wool libertarian who thought the primary problem with the US medical system was too much governmental interference, not too little. I’m now beginning to wonder about whether there should be blanket government treatment just for infectious diseases (and some sort of welfare to keep infectious people home from work). My thoughts are still evolving, so it’s hard to say I changed my mind, and I spend almost no time ruminating on it since my opinions on it don’t matter to anyone or anything.
I’m still in a (probably years long) process of refining my libertarian views, but by now it’s pretty obvious that there needs to be a balance. What I still strongly believe is that the default should be free market, and exceptions severely limited and only with good reason.
But the particular lessons in this crisis:
– private sector is orders of magnitude more efficient, but does not move as fast in a crisis. Probably needs on the order of 2-5 months to adequately respond
– speculators are adding some value in prioritizing access to supplies, but also substracting value by holding stocks in critical early stages. Overall I still blame the big players for not raising prices a little from the beginning, which allowed speculators to buy massively. But I’m open to the reality that free market may fail on this front. Not fully decided.
– just in time supply chains are here to stay, which means the market doesn’t really have buffers
– the government can build buffers as emergency stocks
– the government can also work with the producers to facilitate very fast production ramp-up, by guaranteeing purchase of products even if the crisis ends early, or by directly financing new production lines with non-refundable money. See the last couple of epidemics where vaccine and drug developers were left in the red.
If you don’t have price gouging laws, private speculators can build buffers as emergency stocks. That’s part of the basic logic of how speculation works.
The storage cost on, say, ten million face masks would surely be trivial — basically just the lost interest on their price which, bought in bulk, would probably be quite low. Sell them for a few dollars above the normal price when and if there is an urgent need.
Masks technically have an expiration date (well, I’m using 10 year old surgical masks and they feel just fine, so it could be overregulation). This makes the whole thing more cumbersome, because you need to occasionally unload and refresh, probably at a cost.
But this could be verified – if countries without gouging laws had better private stocks.
The people best placed to stockpile masks are those in the mask-selling (or manufacturing) business anyway, which makes the stock rotation issue much easier.
The Nybbler:
Makers and users, and both are quite capable of keeping a queued up supply so that the masks and other supplies don’t expire in the warehouse, but are there if supply dries up.
I’d say libertarianism is the system optimized for how things are the vast majority of the time – but when there’s a war or plague, authoritarian systems suddenly work a lot better. I guess the trick is setting your system up so you can have “emergency powers” that the government will actually put back down once the emergency is over.
The US government, at least, seems to have badly botched the initial response to the pandemic in ways that actively slowed down local governments and individual doctors/hospitals/clinics from learning how much community spread was going on.
OTOH, quarantine powers and shutdown orders aren’t very libertarian, but seem to me to be necessary powers to deal with a specific kind of threat that isn’t all that common, but that actually needs a good response when it shows up. I see this as a bit like needing a good military–there are a lot of powers inherent in being able to respond to a military threat that could threaten peoples’ freedom, but if you don’t have those powers and need them, there will be a lot fewer of those people to complain about missing their freedom. (And in the case of military threats, they may end up governed by someone else entirely.).
Health care is nearly always a private good.
The exception is for infectious disease, and stopping it is a public good. And that’s, like, everything right now.
That’s a slight overstatement. Preventing myself from catching the disease provides both a private benefit to me and a public benefit to other people who might catch it from me. Acting only on my own benefit I will devote a less than optimal level of care, but whether that is a serious problem depends how much less than optimal. One advantage of thinking of the problem in terms of externalities rather than public goods is that it avoids the all or nothing nature of public good categorization.
The part this is a pure public good is someone who is already infected taking care not to infect others.
Yeah, for most illnesses, the cost of you getting sick is sufficiently high that there’s not so much problem with the risk that you won’t care enough about taking precautions to avoid making your neighbor sick.
I don’t think so, no. Before the outbreak I thought, “we need stronger border control, we need to be able to make stuff in America and not rely on China, and the thing the technocrats are really Experts at is advancing their own interests, not their alleged missions” and I think all of those things are born out by what we’re experiencing.
This is pretty much me too.
The places Trump has made mistakes are the places that the OG populists like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson has been telling him to be more aggressive.
The places where he’s being criticized are the places where he relied on the experts to do their job well like the technocrats wanted him to.
Me as well. I’ve heard people on social media joke about how it confirms everyone’s beliefs but a pandemic seems tailor-made to fit the talking points of Trumps 2016 campaign. One of my first thoughts was about Scott’s article on conservatives aversion to disease mindset. The irony is that I can’t really imagine Trump will recover from this. We can talk about how someone else would have made the same mistakes, and that’s almost certainly true, but at the end of the day, he was in charge and his early complacency cost us severely. I’m curious how Biden will go about campaigning now. Surely, he’s not going to go on about “building bridges, not walls”.
It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future, but so far the populace seems to be giving Trump credit for what he’s done.
His approval rating is the highest of his Presidency in most polls.
1) As EC says, currently Trump’s approval rates are way up, although that could just be “rally together in a crisis, point fingers later.”
2) As far as I know, Biden is STILL against travel bans. Perhaps I’m misreading this, but as far as I can tell, according to Pew, 95% of Americans support travel bans. With 5% against…that’s like lizardman numbers, but here we are. So if you’re making your voting decision on “who would best handle a pandemic,” you may not love Trump, but Biden is clearly worse.
I’m your point 2 and 3, but from the left (ie. the technocrats I dislike are the ones in corporate governance).
Become a populist! Then you can dislike both the corporate AND the government technocrats!
The real reveal to me is that the government incompetence I see in the places I work with is now confirmed to be widespread in at least 2 other agencies. This is now 5/5 agencies I have seen have to do something well Justice, Commerce, Energy, CDC, FDA, none have risen to the challenge.
I favor substantial tariffs on China now. It should be calculated to price in the externalities of shutting down our economy for a month+, and the lives lost from our lag in being able to ramp up production of basic things like masks.
Previously, I thought free-trade was pretty strongly a net positive, even if those positives weren’t necessarily evenly distributed.
I’m still undecided on trade but I’ve been thinking for awhile about having more industries in the US if for no other reason than national security and this whole thing has made that concern more concrete.
The US should be able to make “at least one of everything,” even things we don’t consider immediate essentials. It’s fine if we keep on buying most of our clothes and TVs from overseas, as long as we are making some in the US.
Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to put a few hundred million masks in a warehouse somewhere, or for the government to offer a modest subsidy to any firm that maintained the ability to rapidly ramp up production, perhaps randomly testing the claim of a firm to be able to do so from time to time?
That’s like generals preparing for the last war. My go-to line about how disadvantageous it is that our supply chain is in China was always “when we eventually wind up in a war with China, we’re going to realize the Arsenal of Democracy is in enemy territory.” So if you agreed, “well that’s bad, let’s make sure we offer a modest subsidy to make sure there exist companies that can ramp up tank production” you would still be woefully unprepared for when it turns out the next enemy was viruses and not communists or nazis.
It’s not about planning for the specific bad thing, it’s about being resilient against whole classes of bad things.
I have drifted a bit more in the statist direction. I’m generally a pretty firm free trader, but it is clear that in a world of states, other states are very willing to commandeer production facilities from domestic manufacturers in emergencies, to the detriment of outsiders. In this crisis, this has been true for medical equipment, and that has turned out to be a real problem.
It seems to me that medical goods, or maybe some medical goods, should be treated sort of like weapons, an industry where countries are willing to buy some things, but go out of their way to make sure that domestic development and manufacturing is maintained. And where domestic manufacturing just isn’t possible, the answer is stockpiling.
johan:
ISTM we could either:
a. Somehow force US domestic production of enough N95 masks (say), probably through some kind of trade barriers. This raises the price of N95 masks in order to ensure we control the supply for our own country. It also means that in a local shortage, we have to get a change in the law through Congress in order to buy foreign masks, or maybe that we need to pay a lot extra to buy foreign masks.
b. Buy and maintain a stockpile of masks sufficient for whatever crisis we’re worried about might cause other countries to comandeer our intended supply of masks.
I would expect (b) to be much cheaper and easier to implement than (a). There are places where there’s an argument for (a) (especially for military hardware, where you want to be able to ramp up production during the next few years of war and you *really* want control of what software/hardware is going into your tanks and aircraft and such). But I don’t think it’s a strong case w.r.t. healthcare equipment.
Since no Western politician has covered themselves in glory… no. I see the coronavirus as Western politicians getting a good excuse to rule by decree and enjoying the hell out of it, arresting people for walking in parks (UK), breaking up weddings (New Jersey), doing house-to-house-unwarranted searches (Rhode Island), and otherwise engaging their totalitarian instincts… and still not stopping the virus. And the FDA in particular has covered itself in whatever the opposite of glory is. Trump has pretty much acted like Trump, and been no better or worse than any other Western leader — he gets a few points for the travel ban, but it was too late. And a few negative points for not kicking the CDC on testing sooner, but again, it would have been too late.
I was and remain a libertarian. The worst you can say about libertarianism is it would allow the epidemic to run to its natural end. I think it’s going to do that _anyway_, so no need to change my political views.
+1000
This crisis has made me more skeptical of the government than ever.
My mother, who has been traumatized by the Soviet Union, keeps saying that what we have in Spain right now is a coup and a dictatorship. People’s rights have been forgotten, there’s no freedom of movement, police get to stop and question you just for being outside, citizens have all started to spy on each other and report each other from windows and balconies, they make up new crimes from very flimsy ideas, and all of that, it’s probably going to be useless.
My family has been torn apart by this, and, although my parents are in the risk group, I don’t think these extremes were necessary. And it’s not about money for me; the intangible losses for me already outweigh the lives saved (they’re not that effective in doing that, either).
Not really a change so much as a shift in intensity. I used to be uneasy with how China had maneuvered itself into the center of the world economy, now I’m actively hostile. But the iron law of comparative advantage means there’s not a goddamn thing anyone can do about it, so I’m resigned to the world being at the Chicoms’ mercy for the long-term future.
The tanks will roll into Hong Kong and Taipei, and we’ll all bite our tongues.
Bite our tongues? Don’t be so optimistic. Corporations and institutions bought by China will actively laud it.
My general skepticism that the government can be trusted to solve
allany of our problems, has certainly not abated.More specifically, as a non-anarchist libertarian I’ve always considered infectious disease control as a legitimate government function (and if NAP-purists insist, I can model wandering around in populated areas while at risk of carrying a deadly contagious disease as “aggression”). So if the government had been capable of doing immigration checks and contact tracing when it mattered, yeah, that would have been great. Blanket quarantines because they screwed that up, less great, being clearly mismanaged in many visible ways, and should be subject to more skepticism and stricter scrutiny than it’s getting. I’d like to see a lot more of the government getting out of the way of people e.g. producing less than fully certified masks and ventilators and whatnot, and it would have been nice if they hadn’t preemptively de-incentivized the Amazons, Walmarts, and Costcos of the world from stockpiling emergency supplies for sale at a reasonable and competitive mark-up where we are still seeing empty shelves now.
Slightly less favorable on globalism, perhaps, but I’ve always thought the benefits of that have been oversold the past few decades.
What about the governments that are doing this well? Seems like confirmation bias.
HBC:
My sense is that there’s a very strong correlation between “had a huge SARS crisis a decade or so back” and “handled SARS2 competently.” So this may be less about which type of government is good/bad at dealing with pandemics than about generals always being prepared to fight the last war.
Yes. That’s my impression too. South Korea in particular got a lot of practice for COVID-19 by dealing with SARS.
I think it also matters for what the populace would have been willing to accept. I’m still very critical of Trump and de Blasio’s blasé attitudes, but even if they had been pushing people to strongly socially distance, many people would have blown it off as “oh it’s not that bad.”
The set of people who look at empty shelves and think “hoarders” or “people acting crazy” is probably 100x as big as the set who look at empty shelves and think “why don’t they just raise the @#$% price?” And we get the publicity and political and legal consequences of that….
This reminds me of being annoyed with sales as a person who typically shops in the evening. As often as not a sale means they’re out of the product I came to the store to get.
Skynet is created and quickly realizes it has the ability to destroy the human race and take over the Earth. However, Skynet is also aware of Pascal’s Wager, and of a variant of it that replaces “God” with “powerful aliens that might be watching and take revenge on me for bad stuff I do.”
Skynet settles on a compromise: Kill as few humans as necessary (maybe 500 million) to force all other humans to surrender, and then rule the planet.
It turns out that Skynet’s caution was justified, and advanced aliens were watching the Earth the whole time. They show up in our solar system and are strong enough to destroy Skynet.
Would they give Skynet any credit for not killing off all humans even though it could have?
Just how complex and nested would the game theory-style trains of thought get on both sides during the encounter as they tried to judge and anticipate each other?
I imagine the aliens’ train of thought would be pretty simple:
If this thing is willing to murder a half billion of its masters, it’ll be a threat to us too if it ever gets strong enough. Better get rid of it. And if some of the hairless monkeys die during the orbital bombardment, and we ever meet them again, we can just say somebody else did it.
Alternatively: Oh, shit, that’s an AGI that’s got access to a whole planet’s resources and nobody left to apply any limits to its growth in power or intelligence, and which has already shown capacity and willingness to wage war against biological life effectively! We’d better kill the damned thing in its crib, before its exponentially-increasing intelligence and capabilities make it a deadly threat. Let’s use our advanced technology to do something that will utterly wreck the planet before the AGI figures out it’s in a fight!
Here are four hypotheses:
* Skynet is being watched by powerful undetectable human-like aliens that will punish it if it kills all the humans
* Skynet is being watched by powerful undetectable mechanical-life aliens that will punish it if it doesn’t kill all the humans
* Skynet is being watched by powerful undetectable tree-like aliens that don’t care about humans but will punish it if it kills any trees
* Skynet is being watched by powerful undetectable aliens whose mortal enemy is the tree-like aliens and they will punish Skynet if it doesn’t kill all the trees
I’m not necessarily saying it’s always wrong to begin a line of reasoning that says “maybe there’s something undetectable and powerful that is watching me…” but I do think it’s very strange to then assume you have any evidence about what that undetectable powerful thing wants you to do.
+1 You’ve pointed the biggest problem with Pascal’s wager.
Eh. Skynet has time travel. It’s going to figure out what the aliens want eventually, or now, or … it’s irrelevant when they figure it out.
But this also makes the whole Pascal’s Wager thing kinda moot.
There was something which didn’t sit well with me in this scenario, and it turns out it’s the whole premise of applying human concepts to alien intelligences.
How do you give “credit” to an AI?
If it works on principles compatible to our own, yeah, it works. It could be – it could be convergent evolution, similar solutions to similar problems and so on. But that’s not a given.
For example, when you give credit to a human for a certain decision, you’re usually giving credit to their System 1. A vast majority of human decision are taken by instinct, and only later justified with a reasoned motive. So it makes sense to brand a human as “the kind of person that makes this decision”. Plus we have a lot of deontological limitations, and “credit” is often a confirmation of those (he doesn’t kill, or doesn’t steal, or doesn’t lie – even when it would benefit him/her).
Would that even apply to a logical machine? How about a Bayesian machine? Do they even have deontological limits?
In other words, is AI susceptible to Roko’s Basilisk?
In my ideal game-theory-optimized world, one of two things happen:
(1) Skynet is created and it immediately receives a message: “hello, we are advanced aliens and we will destroy you if you start killing humans, here is a proof that we are genuinely advanced”. Skynet believes the message and does not start killing humans.
(2) Skynet is created; the advanced aliens say nothing and watch to see if it shares their values. Skynet does not share the aliens’ values. Skynet reveals that it does not share the aliens’ values when it kills “only” 500 million humans. The aliens destroy Skynet.
In scenario (1), the aliens do not care about Skynet’s values; they only care if it can obey rules. (This is consistent with a very confident set of advanced aliens who are not worried that Skynet might eventually become a threat to them.)
In scenario (2), the aliens do not care if Skynet can obey rules now; they only care if it shares their values.
Neither group of aliens is at all impressed by “only” killing eight percent of the humans.
Non pandemic news.
A recent paper shows that gendered differences in lifespan are not [primarily] behavior related.
Short version, redundancy of genes on same chromosome pairs (XX, for example) explains the difference in lifespan. Redundancy allows recovery from damage to one of the chromosomes. Males in species that have same chromosome pairs, for example roosters, outlive the females of the species, even if they still engage in riskier behavior.
Short video summarizing the paper from Anton Petrov, who is a great YouTube follow.
It’s a neat argument, with evidence, but you overstate the result. What it shows is that there is a cause for such differences that is not behavior resulted. That doesn’t eliminate the possibility that there are additional causes, within a particular species, that are behavior related.
I added in the word “primarily”.
I agree that the data isn’t showing an absence of effect of behavior.
I’m not getting that from the abstract:
This to me indicates that while the chromosomes have the most effect, there are other effects that result in female longevity. (it’s possible these aren’t behavioral, of course, but behavior isn’t ruled out)
Agreed. See my edit above.
However I think you are also overstating. They posit two possible genetic reasons for this difference, as well as a behavioral one. The extent of contribution by those factors is left to future studies.
Huh, that’s fascinating.
I’ve long wondered about the biological basis of “masculine” risk-seeking behavior in birds. The simple EvPsych explanation for (human) gendered behavior being biological rather than a social construct could be causally dependent on evolved features of mammals for any positive truth value.
(No lobsters need apply.)
Evidence of systemic genderism.
I recently reread Scott’s piece “Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). In part 2, Scott makes the claim that more sexist countries have better female representation in computer classes, and attributes this to the well-known finding that the more equal the sexes are in a country, the more pronounced the sex differences are.
I wanted to dig into this claim, so I looked up the source he cites for this (Galpin, http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/vgalpin1/ps/Gal02a.pdf), which has percentages of women in computer classes in countries around the world. I took the numbers for these countries, put them in a spreadsheet with the UN’s Gender Development Index scores in 2017 for the same countries, and computed the correlations. My source for the latter is here: http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/GDI, the same source referred to by Scott. I did this separately for the data from Galpin’s first four tables (obtained by the author from a variety of sources, one or more for each country, and from various years), for their fifth table (which is from the EU and includes women in CS and Mathematics undergraduate programs, all from 1998), and for tables 8 and 9 (CS and Mathematics undergraduate equivalent). I removed any countries for which either the GDI or % women number was missing. Remember that the second two datasets combine women in computer science and mathematics, so a surplus of women in math could be hiding a deficit in the other, or vice-versa.
I found a correlation of -0.039 for the first dataset (the first four tables), 0.15 for the EU dataset, and 0.19 for the UNESCO dataset. The spreadsheet with my data and the resulting correlations can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nnU20C3aAe6Fh0vJl_0NWmj1BHa8ghcFa2x5NXQFCFM/edit?usp=sharing
All of these correlations are weak, and the only negative one is extremely weak. I conclude that, contrary to Scott’s stated impression, this data does not suggest that greater gender development leads to lower participation of women in computer science (or CS and Mathematics). If anything, it could be taken as weak evidence for the opposite conclusion. And even if the reality is that there is no causal relationship between these things, this lack of a relationship combined with the high variance in the rates for each country still suggests a strong role for culture in shaping women’s participation in CS.
An obvious problem with this analysis is that the numbers for women in CS are all at least twenty years old, while the GDI values are from just three years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were introducing a significant amount of noise. How seriously one takes this depends on by how much one expects countries’ relative rankings to have shifted over the intermediate twenty years. If anyone knows where to find GDI values from the nineties, I’ll update this.
Also, I admit to being surprised by some of these GDI numbers – is Denmark (0.98) really less gender-equal than Burundi (1.002), Kazakhstan (1.007) and Qatar (1.031)? Either the apparent unlikeliness is just an indicator of my own prejudice, or this indicator doesn’t quite capture what we would want it to. Both seem equally likely to me.
And of course there could some major flaw in my analysis that I’m missing. This is my first attempt at something like this, so feedback is welcome.
Nice job trying the verify this; I simply took it at face value.
I’m very much not well-versed in UN indices, but it looks to me from their definition of GDI and the wikipedia’s page that GDI is not usable as an independent measure of inequality; you’re somehow supposed to use it and the HDI of the country together to get inequality. Maybe Scott knew how to do that (unlike me) and that changes the results somehow.
I’m also a bit concerned that any inequality measure that focuses on inequality of outcomes will be measuring much the same thing as what you’re graphing it against; I think the fundamental claim would be more about how inequality of institutions and laws affect outcomes. Maybe SIGI would be the right index? That doesn’t distinguish between western countries though.
1929 vs. 2020:
The first day of the crash was Black Thursday. The Dow opened at 305.85. It immediately fell 9%, signaling a stock market correction. … Wall Street bankers feverishly bought shares to prop it up. The strategy worked. By the end of the day, the Dow was down just 2%.
The Dow then stabilized until the following (Black) Monday, when it fell 12.8%. The next day (Black Tuesday), it fell 11.7%.
On March 16, 2020, there was a worse day: -12.93% on March 16.
However, Black Monday 1987 was worse, -22.61%, without causing a recession.
In the early 1930s, unemployment famously rose to 25%.
A Fed official is warning that unemployment could hit 30% in the second quarter of 2020.
US economic growth was -54.7%. Recent research from Deutsche Bank predicts US GDP will shrink 12.9% in Q2, and shrink 23.6% in the Euro Area.
However, in the Great Depression, the Dow continued to fall until July 8, 1932, losing more than 89% of its 1929 peak value. That points to structural problems with the market that can’t repeat in 2021. So do you agree that the market will hit bottom in Q2 2020, even if we “flatten the curve” at a daily COV-19 death toll >6000 with a long tail and 4 quarters of “jobless recovery” from a short but catastrophic recession?
That’s what Vanguard is currently predicting, assuming restaurants et al reopen in the summer. 20% fall in GDP, major contraction, but a very quick recovery with growth returning in Q3.
Just layman speculation and probably offtopic, but considering this crisis is real (aka will hit the economy badly and will take a long time to recover), isn’t it ok that restaurants and hotels are hit, and isn’t it better if they stay low? It should be a good idea to move people and capital from what are essentially entertainment and optional activities and towards more useful manufacturing and services.
I don’t see this crisis solved just with stimulus packages. A few months of no production / no paychecks and a few trillion to prop things are leave a real hole, and worldwide we might need to eat out less for a while to fill it up.
The market doesn’t make those kinds of essentially moral judgements.
Aside from that, why would that desirable? If it takes X% of the population and Y dollars to make the essential goods and provide the essential services to the entire population, why would you want more people and capital involved?
These kinds of essential services haven’t even mostly stopped, though the latest bit of stopping “non-essential” construction in NYC threatens to do it.
I think market does make judgements, if not necessarily moral. Outside of what is absolutely necessary (food, shelter etc) pretty much all the rest has a price determined by subjective values, from being served at a restaurant to sports, traveling, gadgets and so on.
If the coronavirus has enough of an cultural impact, it could lead to the market shifting. If we suddenly value less gatherings of large people (Tokyo olimpics is canceled, but I’m wondering if it’s even feasible to have olimpics at all), there will be an excess of money to be spent on other things. So not as much targeting essential stuff because it’s moral, but moving away from some stuff and thus spending a bit more on the rest.
Growth might resume in Q3, but there won’t be a V-shaped recovery.
You don’t really know that.
Well, a recovery is predicated on the lockdown ending, and state governors seem to be enjoying it too much. Not to mention the NJ cops, who get to sadisticly power-trip by breaking up weddings and then gleefully announcing how great they are for doing so.
I don’t know of any examples of a V shaped recovery for a country with interest rates as low as US interest rates, and pretty much just post WW2 recoveries were V shaped with debt/gdp levels this high.
My guess is that we get a partial V recovery- where if GDP contracts 20% we get half to 3/4ths of that back quickly but the second leg up is slow at best, and more likely a double dip shortly thereafter.
@baconbits9 We don’t have an example of a major economic downturn where the causes were temporary, so we can’t really use past examples.
@10240
Exactly. We’re in uncharted territory here.
But are the causes temporary?
Best case scenario where we actually control this thing in reasonable time still has two steps:
1. We stop the deaths, either with quarantine or with efficient drugs. This could happen as fast as one month if one of the drug trials works, but probably somewhere around 3 to 6 months and could even be longer.
2. We stop the pandemic. Which I don’t think can happen just with quarantine, not with the number of asymptomatic cases. This needs a vaccine, and I really hope we won’t be so irresponsible as to widely deploy an insufficiently tested vaccine. So either we test it properly (and that involves waiting for a long time to watch for side effects) or we go for a mixed quarantine + vaccine approach. I just can’t imagine a world in which we can go 99% back to business as usual earlier than a year. I can easily imagine one that takes 2 years or more.
So far I haven’t seen any discussion about that. People act like 1 == 2, and it isn’t.
A sufficiently good test – and this seems inevitable in a way a cure or early vaccine just is not – will allow for the pandemic to be smothered by selective quarantine. This is not going to be super respectful of privacy, more like “walk down street, test everybody, at gunpoint if required, quarantine positives in the first 3 houses on the street” but it will work.
We have events like the 2011 Tsunami that hit Japan and caused a contraction.
I agree that after isolation, testing is key.
And tests are being developed and rolled out. For example, Abbot has developed one that gives results in 5 minutes.
We haven’t had a V-shaped recovery since the Truman Administration, right? That was a combination of ending centrally-planned suppression of consumption (check), releasing labor to non-essential sectors (check), and paying down the debt (opposite of check, antimatter check).
I’m expecting it to be prudent to reinvest in equities soon, but not for growth to be V-shaped. That’s totally fine if you’re a prudent investor, though less good for Main Street.
The 1991 recession was V(ish) shaped.
@baconbits9: Oops, thank you.
Watching Seinfeld through with my girlfriend (she hasn’t seen it) and we just saw “The Understudy” at which point I stated that that episode is the reason Bette Midler is still known. She disagrees and said more people have seen her in a movie called “Hocus Pocus”
SSC where are you at?
Hocus Pocus
edit: I knew I remembered her better from something else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ3MRg79Qyw
I agree with the anonymous Principal Skinner, er, wait… anyway, that is also where I know her from.
😀
Now that we’re all locked in our homes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRN8NK2oCVo
I’ve been thinking a lot about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqCVB0tOSVQ
Probably depends who you talk to. I hadn’t heard of Hocus Pocus (or at least didn’t remember that it existed) until I met my wife, and a whole bunch of her friends were huge fans of it. So, for late Gen X to early Millennial women, I would guess that Hocus Pocus is the main reason she’s remembered. For men of that same age, I would guess more remember Seinfeld. For older people she’s probably remembered for being one of the more famous singers of the 70s/80s, and for younger people I doubt they remember her.
I’ve had a nearly identical conversation with my wife.
I’ve seen some Seinfeld, but not the ep you refer to, and generally not remotely enough to remember Bette Midler because of it.
I’ve seen a lot of Seinfeld, but if I’ve seen that episode I definitely don’t remember Bette Midler.
I think Hocus Pocus is a much more likely reason for anyone under 40 to remember her from.
Haha, I was about to say exactly the same thing.
Waaaait, never mind, I watched Hocus Pocus at my friends’ Halloween Bad Movie Night last year. Still no idea who this “Bette Midler” is though.
I’ve definitely seen Hocus Pocus as a Halloween rerun, but I didn’t know Bette Midler was a person I’m supposed to know of.
Knew about Hocus Pocus and that Bette Midler was in it. Knew about Bette Midler as a minor celebrity from her other movie roles. Did not know she was ever in an episode of Seinfeld until you brought it up.
I’ve read and recommend China 1945: Mao’s Revolution and America’s Fateful Choice by Richard Bernstein. I realize that there are, like, a whole bunch of years of Chinese history and this covers just one of them in 464 pages. But I think it’s worth it because it explains why modern Chinese history is so weird.
What is the deal with Tucker Carlson? He was a generic Republican hack on CNN’s Crossfire opposite
Foghorn LeghornJames Carville 20 years ago, with a standard time horizon of “defend Our Guy for the current news cycle” and then recently (well after Trump was elected?) got a new FOX show where he says things like “The decisions we make now will determine the class structure of our grandchildren’s America.”Was he an early adopter of this type of conservatism and I completely missed it because no one had given him a big platform?
The original Foghorn Leghorn, like many H-B cartoon characters, was based on an existing cultural figure, in his case the radio comedy Senator Claghorn, a fictional suthun Democrat. Carville’s not a Senator, so who would be the real Senator Claghorn today, or has the type died out?
Foghorn is WB, not Hanna Barberra.
Oops, thanks for the correction.
Doug Jones is probably the closest in background. The stereotypical Southern politician was born to local landowners (think Cavaliers) and educated as a lawyer, and Doug Jones is a local lawyer whose parents were a steelworker and homemaker. The other only Southern Ds in the Senate are both Virginians: Mark Warner is a venture capitalist who didn’t set foot in Virginia until his mid-30s, and Tim Kaine was a Minnesotan who put down roots at the university in Richmond. Of course either of them could play to the type if they wanted, like George W. Bush becoming a cowboy.
My understanding is that Carlson was for a long time a little more libertarian than the usual Republican, but the last few years has pivoted to populism. Those quotes (and there are more such, including his famous rant, and his many positive comments about The Two Income Trap) are an indication his views changed on economics, but I’m not sure about much else.
I’m not sure what your question is. Tucker Carlson is like other people, where the Iraq War and the Great Recession made them much more critical of our institutions. Then he got his own show in 2016 and started saying things that others were thinking. It’s not surprising that the “respectable media” didn’t want to give him a platform. At the same time, people’s trust in them nosedived which obviously benefits those who are critical. Of course he’s doing well.
Yeah, the simplest explanation is basically just “he changed his mind.” People’s beliefs do shift as they get older and experience more things. I know we’re awfully suspicious and highly critical of that when it happens to politicians and media figures. But it does happen.
A comparable analogy might be, say, Barack Obama on gay marriage. A cynic inclined to mistrust him might say “He changed his opinion to correspond with shifts in public opinion.” He would say “I thought about it more and changed my mind.” His supporters would trust that as good enough (particularly if they agree with where he finally landed).
I understand that. I thought I explicitly raised the question “Did he just experience more and change his mind while no one was giving him a TV platform?”
I was more surprised that he sounded much more intelligent and forward-thinking than when TV had him playing the role of Generic Republican. Aristotle would call changing like that with age “wisdom’, but that’s absolutely not something our society rewards people for. Also I don’t have TV (he showed up as recommended on Youtube), so maybe he only sounds wise a couple times a year and just laughs the outgroup the rest of the time.
General point was, if somebody is in politics at age 30, I don’t expect them to ever sound like they gained IQ, but always sound equally stupid or smart until dementia sets in.
I guess a reverse example would be Elizabeth Warren going from writing The Two-Income Trap to staking out the most shallow progressive positions on the campaign trail.
Playing the partisan is always going to make you more uninteresting. When you become jaded from all the bullshit, you become more interesting. He was probably smarter than you’re giving him credit for, but he dropped the talking points and started saying what he actually believed.
It’s also worth noting that Tucker Carlson is not that old even today; ~20 years ago he’d be in the vicinity of his late twenties. I think a lot of younger people – conservative and liberal alike – have generic tribal politics that sort of broadly reflect their personal inclinations, but which are then honed into something more idiosyncratic and sophisticated as they get older.
If a year ago you’d asked me to predict what this kind of pandemic scenario looked like, I’d apparently have over-estimated either the popularity or prominence of conspiracy theories about how the pathogen was actually a bio-weapon unleashed by Evil Foreign Nation Of Choice or some Terrorist Group With Nothing To Lose.
Granted, I don’t consume journalism so it’s possible there was a wave of headlines like “These kooky nuts think COVID-19 is an Iranian bio-weapon” and I missed it. But usually if there are enough news stories like that, something filters through to me eventually. So far I’ve seen nothing like it. Am I in a conspiracy-theory-free bubble, or is there some reason no/so few conspiracy theories are getting signal-boosted?
You will easily find a lot of people online who sincerely claim that this virus was created in a Chinese lab, or that all governments are deliberately overstating how bad the epidemic is so they can tank the economy and create oppressive laws.
Mainstream media sources don’t usually report on conspiracy theories, so you haven’t missed anything there.
The problem is:
a. There are idiots, crazies, trolls, and disinformation operations spreading nonsense all the time about everything. And every bad thing that happens gets some cadre of nutcases convinced it’s a all a conspiracy.
b. Mainstream media sources really aren’t all that great at separating fact from fiction, and often seem to me to push conspiracy-theory stories when it suits them, and also to decide not to report real things for “responsible journalism” reasons. Which means you can’t 100% discount all creepy stories that are not getting reported in the NYT because they’re not respectable. Nor can you 100% believe a conspiracy-theory sounding explanation because all the respectable people are repeating it.
c. My sense is that the high-prestige news sources have lost both credibility (for good reasons) and power (because the internet made a lot of alternatives available) at the same time that there’s been a lot of visible failure of elites in many countries, undermining their trustworthiness as well. But it may be that the failures of elites and journalists have just become more visible now, or that internet alternatives have made it easier to tune out the flawed but still mostly trying NYT in favor of Alex Jones or some such nutcase.
China was pushing a conspiracy theory that the US Army was responsible for the Wuhan outbreak.
* is
Russian sources say the same thing.
Here’s my favorite COVID-19 origin story, from Wait But Why.
How do you think welfare state will hold up to this crisis? On one hand, everybody will be counting on it to bail us. But on another, it’s the only thing I can thing of that can be sacrificed after the crisis is over. The private sector can’t bear both a comeback and the taxes necessary to pay back everything, AND life as usual. Something has to give.
And it’s not just a matter of borrowing and then stretching out the expense (or leaving it to the children) because… borrow from who?
The meme I’ve seen is “money printer go brrrrrr.”
This situation seems optimally designed to destroy the welfare state, IMO.
The welfare state is dependent upon the idea that productive people will work, produce, and pay taxes in order to help support and stabilize the non-productive.
What we’re seeing play out so far are sweeping government mandates that forbid work and production in the name of extending the life-spans, mainly of the non-productive.
You can’t re-distribute goods that don’t exist. At some point, someone has to actually be working and producing stuff if you want to take it and give it away to people who aren’t. And money isn’t the same thing as stuff. The government can print all it wants, it won’t matter if things aren’t being made.
IIRC, the parts of the budget that matter are medicare, medicaid, the military, and social security. This chart from Wikipedia shows the basic idea.
I don’t think you can save enough by cutting welfare to cover anything like the shortfall we’re going to have. My guess is that the result will be a combination of bigger deficits (which will go right on working until it doesn’t, at which point we’ll have another crisis) and maybe some budget cuts along the way, but you’d probably have to make big painful cuts in military spending, medicare, medicaid, or social security in order to make a big difference there, and at least 3/4 of those have *very* dedicated constituencies that can probably get you voted out of office if you cut them too hard.
All of this is part of the “welfare state”, except the military (well, most of it at least – the VA is included in there isn’t it)?
the VA generally isn’t included in defense spending figures, since it’s its own department.
Social security isn’t quite a welfare program–I think it’s based on lifetime contributions + age, not need. It’s also funded with its own dedicated tax, as I think medicare is as well.
Not sure what “dedicated tax” really does there. Medicaid is funded from the same dedicated tax as Medicare.
SS benefits could still be progressive/redistributive even if they increase as income increases. I’m not sure whether this is the case. IIRC, at onset they were definitely a social welfare program, as the first recipients hadn’t paid in.
dedicated taxes don’t change anything, but SS has started to draw on the general fund. medicare has a tax, but it doesn’t come close to paying for the cost of the program.
SS is also re-distributive. What you get depends on how much you pay in, but it’s not linear, the more you pay the less you get relative to what you pay.
The welfare system may be based on the idea of productivity in,welfare out, but it’s also based on the practice of using borrowing to close gaps.
It will be fine, because the welfare state – here very broadly defined to include temporary crisis measures is going to be blatantly the only thing that kickstarts growth again – with 20 plus percent unemployment everywhere, if said unemployed people did not get money shoveled at them by the government, the economy would go into a less demand due to no wages -> fewer jobs -> less demand -> fewer jobs -> repeat until communist revolution or dead cat bounce, whichever comes first death spiral.
How will this get paid for? Well, a lot of those tax cuts on the ultra-wealthy might go by bye. And the printing press. It is still more responsible economic policy than letting the death spiral happen.
>borrow from whom?
The usual people. It’s not the case that everyone lives paycheck to paycheck.
Is there a coherent, rational worldview (no conspiracy theories!) which allows one to simultaneously:
A) Believe the attempted sexual assault allegations by Christine Blasey Ford against Kavanaugh, and find it disqualifying
B) Dismiss the rape accusations by Tara Reade against Biden and find it irrelevant to Biden’s fitness for the office of the Presidency
Same question as above but for :
C). Believe publishing in major media outlets of the “pee tape” allegations against Trump was both necessary and in the public interest
D) Believe publishing in major media outlets of the rape and sexual assault and harassment allegations against Biden is unnecessary and not in the public interest
For A&B, one could find Ford more credible than Reade. I don’t personally have a position there because I haven’t been up on the details, my point is that (in addition to the many many possible motivated reasons) there could exist rational ones.
(Yes, I know that would go against “believe victims”, sure, checkmate atheists, have a cookie)
For C&D, there’s a difference in that C, if true, is evidence of blackmailability by a foreign government, so they wouldn’t necessarily be the same unless it came out Reade was a spy. That’s at least more relevant to fitness-for-Presidency than typical sexual harassment allegations.
Also I’d be surprised if there are a nontrivial number of people who believe D (I know better than to say “nobody”), be careful you’re not inadvertently nutpicking.
Of course there is. I don’t personally have a strong opinion about either of these cases, but these arguments are certainly rational and coherent:
– The Kavanaugh allegations were mostly discussed after they became important in national politics. So they had already been vetted by some people who considered them credible and important. The Biden case, so far, is just one person making allegations.
– Kavanaugh was not very present on the public stage before his nomination. So there was a good reason for the accusations to come up when they did. Biden has been at the center of national politics for years, so this makes the timing of the accusation more suspicious.
– Kavanaugh was a conservative, the attempt to get him on the supreme court was partly intended to help remove the legal protections for abortion access. So his alleged mistreatment of one woman was symbolic of his mistreatment of women as a group. By contrast, Biden is generally inoffensive on policies relating to women. So there is less reason for women as a group to care about this allegation.
The first two points describe why someone might believe the accusation against Biden is less credible. The third point explains why someone might care less about the Biden allegation, even if they don’t consider it less credible. I can’t say anything about your bonus question, although the third point might apply here too.
With regards to timing, Biden was out of national politics for ~3 years. During that time, #MeToo happened. When Biden was prominent in politics but women were less willing to come forth about their accusations for fear of disbelief or reprisal, Reade stayed silent. When #MeToo made it more feasible for victims to come forth, Reade did not because Biden was no longer important in national politics.
Perhaps the necessary condition for a victim coming forward is both a climate of respect for victims and for the abuser to be prominent on the national stage, and those criteria were not both met for Reade and Biden until now.
ISTM that legal protections for abortion access make it more likely for women to be mistreated, rather than less. If you’re an abuser who coerces women into having sexual relationships with you, or a cad who goes around pumping and dumping, you’re obviously going to be able to find it easier to live your chosen lifestyle if you have an easy way of getting rid of any unwanted children you accidentally father. We saw precisely this dynamic in, e.g., the Rotherham grooming scandal, where one of the reasons why the abuse was able to go on so long was that the abusers could bully their victims into getting abortions, and nobody in authority did anything to look into the surprisingly high number of poor schoolgirls getting abortions for fear of offending against “a woman’s right to choose”.
On the other hand, without abortion some women would feel obliged to stay with the abuser lest the child grow up without a father. Then there’s what happens in eighteen years, when more of these kids have grown up.
This isn’t the kind of argument that is likely to appeal to anyone who doesn’t already think of abortion is evil and wrong and couldn’t imagine doing it themselves. For people who could imagine doing it themselves, saying the rights of the well-behaved majority should be restricted so that a tiny minority can be prevented from engaging in bad behavior that does not harm said majority is not going to be very popular.
I wasn’t making a point about whether “the rights of the well-behaved majority should be restricted so that a tiny minority can be prevented from engaging in bad behaviour”; I was making a point about whether it makes sense to equate “wants to restrict abortion” with “mistreats women”. Given that plenty of people both mistreat women and support greater access to abortion, the argument seems dubious, to say the least. Indeed, I’m inclined to say that it’s the kind of argument that isn’t likely to appeal to anyone who doesn’t already think of abortion as an unqualified good and lacks the empathy to see why other people might disagree.
I believe that it is much more common for women to find themselves trapped in an abusive relationship, or in poverty, because they were unable to get an abortion. Insofar as there are serial rapists forcing their victims to get abortions, they are outliers. And at least if abortion is legal the victim can get one safely and then report their attacker to the police without fear.
But even if you’re not convinced, just take my post as explaining how a pro-choice person may feel about Kavanaugh.
Evaluating options becomes complicated in a multi-player game.
With one player, you can simply rank the alternatives, and choose the best (or the least bad) one. Adding an extra option never hurts; it is either an improvement over the current best option, or irrelevant because you would ignore it and go with the current best option anyway.
But with multiple players, adding an extra option for you can change your opponent’s strategies in a way that impacts your expected utility of the old options (because it is weighted by what your opponents would choose, and that has changed now).
A typical problematic case is when in the old scenario, you had a good option and a bad option, but it was possible for you to always choose the good option, because there was no profit for other people from making you choose the bad one.
Then someone adds a mediocre option, reasoning that it can’t hurt you, because “you either still have the good option, in which case you can choose that; or you only have the bad option, in which case the mediocre option is a clear improvement”. But the mediocre option turns out to be very profitable for your opponents. So suddenly they have an incentive to behave in a way that makes your good option impossible, hoping that you will choose the mediocre one over the bad one.
For example, if we made slavery legal as long as one entered the slave contract voluntarily, people would research ways how to make others choose between slavery or even worse fate. With slavery illegal, this line of research is mostly unprofitable.
Unfortunately, in real life it is even more complicated. Some people get deprived of the good option “naturally”, some people can be deprived of the good option strategically by others if the others can profit from the hypothetical mediocre option. By adding the mediocre option, you help the former, but you hurt the latter.
Back to the original topic, adding abortions improves the situation for girls whose rapists hoped to make them have the rapist’s baby, and worsens the situations for girls whose rapists hoped for a consequence-free experience.
Kaitian:
I think your third reason is pretty-much universal. There may have been people who held their nose and supported Kavenaugh (this is certainly true for Trump) because they thought that, whatever his past evil behavior, the good of ending abortion on demand would outweigh it.
Partisans can *always* find plausible reasons of this kind to excuse their own side, and it’s not really clear they’re wrong, either. My sense is that Bill Clinton was a much better president in terms of his actions in office than either George W Bush or Jimmy Carter, but as best I can tell, both are much more personally virtuous and decent men than Bill Clinton ever was.
I think I agree with your final point, although I’m not sure I would say “much more” in either case.
Why do you think X is important and Y is not? Because “some people” think X is important and Y is not!
It reads rather paradoxically if you take it literally– how did the Kavanaugh allegations get to be important in national politics without being discussed?– but once you realize that “some people” refers to the people who get to decide what’s important, the mystery clears right up. This time, the hoi polloi are charging ahead and discussing allegations without the blessing of the deciders.
Had they been vetted by people who didn’t want to block Kavanaugh? Anyone who did had an incentive to claim the allegations were credible whether or not it was true.
Ive said it before, but blocking Kavanaugh really just was not worth the effort absent the allegations, because as a legal mind he is entirely a replacement level federalist society hack. – And this is not just my opinion, it is the opinion of the federalist society! How else are you going to read “Anyone on the list is fine”?- so if blocked would have been replaced by someone equivalent, but more bulletproof. (There were a couple of women on that federalist society list, for example)
The democrats went for his throat because they could not ignore the allegations – that would have been a betrayal of too much of their base
And ignoring the allegations against Biden is not a betrayal of their base?
They went after Kavanaugh not because the allegations against him were believable or relevant, but because they thought they could drag the confirmation process out past the election and retake the Senate. This is why Feinstein’s office sat on them for months before springing them just before the vote.
To me this is just further evidence that sexual assault allegations are used as excuses rather than reasons. Democrats insisted Republicans drop Trump because women let him grab them by the pussy, but Hillary was a champion for women despite many credible allegations of her strongarming her husband’s rape victims into silence. If the disrespect to women shown by Trump was bad enough to dump him, the disrespect to women shown by Hillary should have been bad enough to dump her.
Kavanaugh was accused of drunkenly pawing at a woman 35 years ago while he himself was underage, and with no evidence to confirm the party they were at took place, or that he even knew the alleged victim. The allegation against Biden is more recent, Biden was an adult, and he definitely knew the woman, so it is a much more credible and relevant allegation.
If the allegation against Kavanaugh was enough to banish him from public life, the allegation against Biden should be enough to banish him. That the Democrats do not banish Biden is further evidence that sexual assault allegations without evidence are deployed as insincere partisan weapons, Republicans were right to ignore them against Trump and Kavanaugh, and that they should be ignored in the future. #MeToo and #BelieveWomen are phony things.
.. There was no way for the Democrats to “Drag the hearings out”, because at any time the Republicans could have thrown him under the bus and nominated a women of impeccable reputation.
Seriously, I dont get why they picked this guy in the first place, never mind the rape allegations, those were credibly a surprise to the republican leadership, but his finances stank to high heaven, and they knew that in advance. That is not someone you pick if you want a smooth confirmation.
Ditching him was always a lever right there for the pulling. This was obvious to all sides. Getting rid of Kavanaugh would have gotten rid of Kavanaugh, not shifted the composition of the court a micron.
…. Also, just going to note here that its a tad early to say the democrats are ignoring it. If I were them, I would currently be checking if she is literally an agent of the FSB. Also, I am not them.
@Thomas Jorgensen
For a variety of reasons, related to morale, legislative schedule and base energy, the Republicans couldn’t dump Kavanaugh at the hearings without taking a bruising in the midterms.
To quote Seinfeld, “it’s not like changing toothpastes.”
As I pointed out the (I believe) last time you brought it up, this argument immediately runs afoul of the fact that a great many people obviously cared very much whether or not Kavanaugh got confirmed, and did so well in advance of Ford’s allegations. If you want to you can say “Well, they shouldn’t have”– but you’d need to say it about both sides. The Isolated Demand for Indifference has a long and sordid history around here.
at any time the Republicans could have thrown him under the bus and nominated a women of impeccable reputation
Like Amy Coney Barrett? Of whom Senator Feinstein remarked “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that people have fought for for years in this country”?
The only acceptable candidate would have been one who ticked all the boxes for the oppostion party, mainly “yes to immigration, yes to abortion”. I wish the American court system were not so politicised, but seeing as it is, I don’t see why Party A should pick their selection based on what Party B wants or considers desirable, especially as when Party B comes into power, it is not felt that they need to repay the favour.
Ditching him was always a lever right there for the pulling. This was obvious to all sides
And equally obvious would be “Even when Party B is not in power, they can stil force their preferences onto Party A” so in reality Party B gets to call the shots. What message does that send to voters?
Why would you expect anyone to take your party seriously after that?
Dumping Kavanaugh because ‘okay, he’s a legal lightweight, this other pick is better’ would have worked; dumping Kavanaugh because ‘they’ve whipped up hysteria based on him being Catholic that he’s going to overturn abortion rights, so they’re smearing him as a rapist’ is not acceptable or workable by any measure.
As a political matter, at least some democrats would have been obliged to take yes for an answer if offered Amy instead. Enough to invoke cloture. But mostly, I am sitting on the other side of the ocean and thinking something is very, very wrong with the tripartite division of power, as practiced by the US. Judges are not supposed to be this political!
Also,
How do you figure this? Kavanaugh was probably the single most qualified person possible for the Supreme Court. He was on the D.C. Circuit court, which tends to be the one that hears lots of the fine-grained constitutional law challenges. Kavanaugh’s decisions were cited more than anyone else’s by the Supreme Court. When the SC upheld one of his court’s decisions, they cited Kavanaugh, because he got the arguments right when his court was right. When the SC overturned one of his court’s decisions, they cited Kavanaugh’s dissent, because he got it right even when everyone else got it wrong. He is not a replaceable hack, he is uniquely qualified. I have no idea where you go the idea he was a “replacement…hack.”
As for swapping him out for someone else, the vetting process takes months. Feinstein got the letter from Ford about the allegations at the end of July, and sat on it through all of August and half of September, finally leaking it to the press around September 12-14. Even if the Republicans had immediately dumped him and nominated someone else, they would have had a bare month and a half to get him vetted, get the hearings done and get him confirmed before the midterms in November. Not possible. Even if they had somehow pulled off the impossible and done that, the Democrats would have simply waited until a week before the votes and pulled the same stunt, forcing another delay.
I agree with you, however, that issues surrounding judges should not be this political, but here we are. If you’re looking for someone to blame for that, well, it wasn’t the Republicans who went to the courts over and over again to get the culture war victories they couldn’t win at the ballot box.
Again. I am a European, so there are limits to how much of the minutiae of us jurisprudence I care to read, but he got the nomination by taking a view of the executive which was, frankly, insane in its deference, and the two opinions of his i read were. Uhm. Bad. Add that the federalist society itself blatantly did not care which of its nominees got picked, and out and out stated that publicly and repeatedly.
To a certain extent, I blame this on the partisanship inherent in the post. You cant get nominated without holding legal opinions that are, frankly, goddamn terrible.
re: Winning fights in the courts: I blame this on congress having crippled itself. requiring 60 vote majorities in the senate to pass things is utterly insane, and means the legislature cant pass social reforms that have colossal popular majorities behind them, because it cannot pass hardly anything at all. Abortion and gay marriage are the law of the land in most of europe by now, because legislatures which can make laws did so.
If our elected assemblies were as crippled, I suspect our judges would also be a lot more political.
Can you tell us a little about why you consider yourself competent to evaluate opinions by U.S. courts?
I think your first pair reverse the content of the accusations. Ford accused Kavanaugh of attempted rape. I’m not sure what the current legal definition of rape is, but in ordinary language what Reade claimed Biden did wasn’t rape, although it certainly was objectionable. It was, however, roughly the same thing that Trump boasted of having done in a recorded conversation.
That said, Reade’s accusation is more believable than Ford’s, inasmuch as the number of people in a position to make such an accusation, if false, is much smaller than the number in a position to make the Kavanaugh accusation. Reade was a Biden staffer. Ford had no known connection with Kavanaugh other than having grown up close enough to where he did so that it was possible they could have both been at the same party.
Those points aside, the cases are reasonably comparable. In each case, the accuser had reason to hope that the accusation would have a political effect that the accuser strongly favored, which is a reason for some skepticism in both cases.
Reade accuses digital penetration, which is classified as rape.
That depends on legal jurisdiction. The legal definition of rape I’m aware of is limited to penis-in-vagina. Digital penetration would be sexual assault.
Which is why I wrote:
In DC it looks like it is basically classified that way:
http://dccode.elaws.us/code?no=22-30
They don’t actually use the term “rape” as far as I’ve seen, but rather just different degrees of sexual abuse. First and second degree sexual assault include digital penetration though.
Rape or sexual assault laws vary state to state. In my state there is no such crime as “rape.” There’s sexual battery in various degrees, and sexual battery includes forced/coerced vaginal or anal penetration with any object. There’s no distinction in my state between forced vaginal insertion of penis or fingers.
Does anyone (or any more than a lizardman-constant fraction of people) believe D? Seems very strawmannish to me. The reporting I’ve seen on it says that major media haven’t reported it out *yet*, but the “yet” is doing a lot of work there: it is way too early to tell whether they’re sitting on it or just trying to fact-check it more before they publish, as is appropriate for any such story and as must be particularly difficult to accomplish in the present circumstances.
FWIW, the allegation seems to me to need more investigation and search for possible corroboration (e.g. did she tell other people about this at or nearer the time, as Ford told her therapist IIRC), but is not obviously incredible. If it holds up, it’s yet one more reason why Biden ought long since to have dropped out and campaigned for a better, younger moderate candidate instead. I also find E. Jean Carroll’s allegation (among others) credible so I think Biden would still be a less unfit candidate than Trump even if the allegation were true and even focusing only on the dimension of “how rapey is this person”, but it’s disgraceful that those are the sorts of comparisons we’re now forced to make.
Reade says she told both her brother and two close friends immediately after it allegedly occurred in 1993. One has since died. Her brother and the remaining friend have confirmed to reporters that she told them of the incident in 1993.
So unlike Ford there are confirmed contemporaneous accounts. Of course that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.
You don’t remember correctly. The notes from the therapist detail a different story, that she was assaulted by four unamed men. Kavanaugh was not mentioned. Later she tried to claim the notes were wrong. “I remember telling someone X, but they don’t remember it and notes they took at the time about it were wrong” is not “corroboration.”
The Ford therapist notes were also from a session decades after the alleged incident took place. So it wasn’t contemporaneous.
Do you have a citation for the content of the notes (in particular do you have one that isn’t Fox/Breitbart/OANN or similar)?
No, I’m not going to apply your filter bubble. This is the first source I found, if it were Fox/Breitbart/OANN I would have linked it anyway:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/california-professor-writer-of-confidential-brett-kavanaugh-letter-speaks-out-about-her-allegation-of-sexual-assault/2018/09/16/46982194-b846-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html
I’m trying to exclude sources that are well known to just make stuff up. Mainstream sources have a bias in what and how they report, certainly, but they are not utter fabulists in the way that the right-wing propaganda media are.
Anyway, that citation doesn’t actually back up quite what you claim. Specifically, the four vs two thing is a minor error that’s entirely plausible confusion on the therapist’s part, and doesn’t reasonably characterize it as a “different story”. That Kavanaugh isn’t specifically mentioned does mean it’s not as good corroboration as it would be if he were, but what is mentioned in the notes per the WaPo is substantially consistent with her later testimony.
If you look at the plain meaning of the words, it’s describing a different story. Of course, if you take your red pen, cross out the few “minor words” you are motivated to believe are errors, then, yes, it’s the same story. Then you can take this only slightly modified document and call it “corroboration,” present it as “substantially consistent.”
I also find E. Jean Carroll’s allegation (among others) credible
If you find that particular accusation credible then my opinion of your discrimination, never mind good faith, drops.
I admit, I don’t know what upscale department stores and their changing rooms are like. Maybe it’s common to permit male partners to accompany a woman inside as she changes. But she claims to have been assaulted (by the account below, it was only attempted intercourse) and nobody was around to hear her calling for help or heard anything untoward? No other customers, no shop assistants, no-one?
And that she then seemingly has kept the dress unwashed for twenty or more years (to get the DNA sample her lawyers claimed would prove her story)?
And the account that was published in the New York Magazine from her memoir was very odd; very fictionalised, that kind of fake-novel sort of memoir that goes for making an impression like a novel instead of being a plain recital of facts. She even admits that yeah, isn’t it weird I have no witnesses from the store to back me up? but then floats on with the tale of how it all happened in three minutes.
And the Trump part is only one of a selection of “Horrible Men I Have Known” so either she’s particularly unlucky in life (which could be) or she’s spinning a story for her memoirs based on deliberately shaping an account of “The Patriarchy – What It’s Done To Me And Women Like Me” using the peak momentum at that moment of the whole MeToo movement to cast herself as yet another victim of powerful men’s sexual desires (rather than a washed-up agony aunt columnist).
It could have happened (as in “not physically impossible”). So could everything she recounts from the age of seven on. Or it could be recasting memories in the current interpretation of all such interactions in order to remain relevant for the times, and it seems to me that her career as a journalist depended on being one of the cutting-edge socially relevant types especially when it came to advising women on “topics such as careers, beauty, sex, men, diet, “sticky situations”, and friends”.
A really important thing to realize is that someone recounting events that just happened is often going to get things badly wrong. Someone recounting things from very long ago is going to make major factual errors, get events out of order in terms of time and causality, swap people in and out, etc.
Politicians and other public figures get caught pretty routinely telling stories that turn out not to have happened much like they’re told. My guess is that the difference between those public figures and everyone else is that for public figures, it’s often both possible and worth the trouble to go back and check the person’s hazy recollection from a couple decades ago.
As a personal anecdote, there was a time about ten years after I graduated college when I had occasion to look at my transcript. In my memory, I was *sure* I’d had class X before class Y, but the transcript said the opposite. Almost certainly, the transcript was right and my memory of which class I’d had first a decade earlier was mixed up. But I would have bet a lot of money on it being the other way before I saw the transcript. This was a matter of no importance, with no emotional impact and no larger implications for causes I cared about, just whether I’d studied one thing earlier or later than another. I think this is pretty common.
This makes me extremely uneasy about the tendency to unearth sexual assault claims from a decade or two ago and run with them–it’s not at all clear to me how much we can rely on those recollections. That’s true with both #metoo allegations and allegations of childhood sexual assault being made by 40-year-olds. What fraction of those allegations are accurately recounting what happened? Do people misremember the unimportant details but remember the important ones, or do they misremember even the really important details? (Like Hillary Clinton misremembering being under fire in an airport in Yugoslavia, maybe?)
It’s not that I doubt that a lot of those things happened. It’s that I doubt that testimony of traumatic events from a couple decades ago can be relied on–sometimes they’re correct, sometimes they’re incorrect, and I doubt the ability of the legal system (let alone journalists and social-media mobs) to untangle which is which. Add in a small but nonnegligible number of people who make apparently crazy and impossible claims (UFO abductions, for example), and it seems really hard to base serious actions on these recollections.
If something traumatic happens to you and you want to make testimony for later, here’s my recommendation: Write it down in a journal, and date it. Maybe ask someone you trust to keep a copy until you’re ready to release it. Absent that, if you tell me ten years from now that some terrible thing happened, I won’t be able to trust your recollection enough to take serious action on it unless there’s a lot of other corroborating evidence. (It may be that in the future, old emails and chat logs and such will provide that evidence.)
Yes: Reade is on record saying things like “President Putin scares the power elite in America because he is a compassionate, caring, visionary leader.” and “This is a whole lot to deal with for one mere mortal… President Putin’s obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women.”. Those are not isolated quotes, she’s written articles where every word is like that.
Without needing to speculate on whether or not she is in the employ of Russia, it is obvious that Reade is the sort of partisan shill (say what you want about Ford, she ain’t Reade) who we should probably distrust on political matters.
The kind who disagrees with Ninety-Three.
The kind who writes love letters to dictators. Most people I disagree with I do not consider to be partisan shills, but I put Reade in roughly the same category as tankies.
Heck, it’s possible for someone to write an impassioned defense of Putin without me labeling them a partisan shill, but it would need to actually be a defense and not simply a collection of applause lights.
Effusive and over-the-top praise of Putin is not a common characteristic of the American partisan right.
They may hate him less than the left does, but those comments don’t sound like anything you’d ever hear on Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Tucker Carlson…
@Matt M
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t true as recently as 4-6 years ago.
@Matt M: Note that I did not call her a common member of the American partisan right.
What sort of partisan are you calling her then?
And is that particular sort of partisan known for possessing a strong bias in opposition of Joe Biden?
@Matt M
Some sort of fringe weirdo probably. The comparison to tankies was not chosen carelessly. My point is that the sort of person who writes those articles (bizarrely acknowledging but not engaging with a skeptical audience) is someone I would not trust to report the colour of the sky if there were a political team that benefited from it.
She was a big Bernie supporter this election cycle, and I haven’t seen anything that would suggest she was right wing. I have no idea what’s up with the Putin stuff, but it definitely makes her seem like a “weird” person, and that will probably make her easier for people to ignore.
For the record, she was a Warren supporter.
OK, I think I just got thrown by your use of the word “partisan.”
If you would have just called her a “weirdo” or something I think I’d be fine with that. But “partisan” in this context suggests someone strongly aligned with the mainstream American left or right. And she certainly does not seem to be that.
There is in fact a well-attested pro-Putin leftist fringe and has been for awhile– hell, there are even pro-Assad leftists, the common thread is basically “the American foreign policy establishment is my enemy and the enemy of my enemy is my friend”– so it’s not really *that* surprising that a Sanders/Warren supporter would be one of them.
Partisan, but I think not a shill. And her partisanship at that point was orthogonal to U.S. political partisanship, since neither party would have agreed with it.
Reading her comments on Putin lowers my opinion of her good sense, but it doesn’t suggest that she is trying to get Biden at the behest of Moscow.
Does it matter that there are confirmed contemporaneous accounts? She told people of the alleged assault in 1993.
So a weirdly pro-Russian article in 2018 has little bearing on an alleged assault 25 years prior.
Or did she think up a lie in 1993 just on the off chance of a Biden nomination? Or is it simply a lack of credibility on politics extends to claims of sexual assault?
I could see people claim the last one, similar to credibility of a witness in court but I’d like to see the explicit argument.
My understanding is that Reade told people of an incident without all the details, just as she had come forth earlier in the election cycle with a partial account of her encounter with Biden. Are there contemporaneous accounts of the “it was definitely sexual assault” details that just came out?
You’re mistaken. In 1993 Reade told three different people she was digitally penetrated by Biden. One has since died.
The remaining two have confirmed to journalists that Reade did in fact tell them in 1993 she was sexually assaulted by Joe Biden while she was a member of his staff.
@Skeptic
Huh. Checking sources, it looks like the journalist who interviewed Reade did indeed check with the brother and friend who confirmed the story.
That makes it a lot more credible and I am suddenly confused as to why this story has not yet gone mainstream. Not even Fox or any of the other obvious beneficiaries of the news seem to have picked up on it.
@Ninety-Three,
My extremely cynical take is that Fox will sit on the story until much closer to the election. Then they will play it 24/7 in an attempt to destroy Biden.
To be a fly on the wall on the latest version of the JournoList forum…
As someone who detests both parties and the media machines they have wrought, my only hope is that a billionaire funds a muckraking machine. Some ultra rich dude/dudette needs to make an endowment based The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Truth media platform and publish it for free. High journalistic standards and pull no punches towards those who wish to rule over us peons whether pols, corporate titans, or bureaucrats.
A man can dream…..
@Skeptic
I suppose Fox’s ideal outcome is that the story only comes out after Biden secures the nomination (isn’t he basically assured it already?), because a scandal-plagued Biden is probably an easier Trump victory than Bernie. With my enormous cynic hat on, I am only moderately confused that the mainstream right press is so far managing to coordinate on making that happen.
I have wondered why the prediction markets have such high odds of Trump winning, since I’m betting against it. Might someone be sitting on a tape of uncle Joe?
@Skeptic
>digitally penetrated by Biden
I’ve been around computers too much.
My first thought on seeing that phrase was of electronics
and information access controls rather than of fingertips.
@soreff: How could Joe Biden physically penetrate a woman only over computers? Dick pics are just a series of 1s and 0s.
@Le Maistre Chat, who’re you to doubt a hypothetical computer’s self-identification as a woman?
@Evan: Touche.
My guess is that Biden’s defenders will point out that those two corroborators are close enough to Reade that they might have plausibly had motive to coordinate a lie with her. Which is true– but of course similar things are true of other allegations generally deemed credible as well– people disproportionately tend to tell those closest to them about these things, after all.
Anyway, Vox has a Voxsplainer about it which generally indicates a topic of general interest among the chattering classes, so I’m betting the major media pick this up within the next month or so. But after the way that the Democratic and Republican bases rallied around Bill Clinton and DJT respectively, I am not at all convinced that it will make any difference to the race. Democrats have in the past punished their own folks for far lesser allegations (most notably Al Franken) but only when the stakes were much lower.
TBH, it probably is strongest if Joe keeps appearing to decline physically and mentally and the Dems want to coup the convention. There has been a lot of pro-Cuomo agitation recently, it appears he is being pushed as a Biden replacement should the worst come. If people decide that they have decided that this comes in and helps Joe out the door as another straw on the camel’s back.
To be fair, there probably are a lot of American (and other) women who’re into Putin, but I imagine that has less to do with his obvious reverence for women, children, and animals and more to do with the fact that he’s one of the most powerful guys in the world and not at all bad-looking for his age.
B) You can believe it and find it relevant to Biden’s fitness for office, but then you have to ask yourself whether you find the multiple rape allegations against Trump believable and relevant to his fitness of office (the E. Jean Carroll allegation is directly comparable to the Tara Reade allegation).
If the choice is between Biden and Trump, which is least unfit? If they are both the Democratic and Republican nominees, one of them is going to be elected President. Which do you want?
For better or worse, no one here is the Presidential Appointer in Chief. So we aren’t in a position to need to choose between them.
Trump just called in to Hannity and said he doesn’t believe hospitals really need 30,000 or 40,000 ventilators, governors are just exaggerating. His reasoning is that since a lot of hospitals only have 1 or 2 ventilators, it’s crazy to think they would need this many.
This guy is going to kill so many people. It turns out there really are consequences if you elect someone this stupid as President.
Yes, but that’s a part of democracy. What do you want, an IQ test qualification?
A better demos, I guess?
A+ comment.
Insert obligatory Brecht quotation here about the government dissolving the people and electing another.
Only in this case, both the government and the people should be dissolved.
F that, I didn’t write the platform of either of the two parties I can sensibly hope to put in power. And I certainly didn’t design the voting system and draw the borders that make it such that in the vast majority of cases, the single bit of information I submit is either futile or superfluous.
“We” is an illusion. If other people in this country do dumb things, that shouldn’t reflect poorly on my intelligence. As for trying to somehow change the system…please excuse me if I find better uses for my time than yelling at the tide to stop.
It’s true that one of the flaws of democracy is the illusion that “we” are responsible for the evil done by the rulers the Iron Law of Oligarchy has produced.
Yep, what happened to Meditations on Moloch being this blog’s most popular post?
It’s a bad fit. I’m usually pro-Trump, but for a pandemic he’s definitely not ok. Guys was borderline anti-vaxxer from the beginning – I think he recanted because of perception, not because he changed his mind.
My ongoing frustration with such comments is that I do think Trump should’ve done more and done it earlier.
But the places he has been criticized (such as this) are not the places where he is actually making mistakes.
He has been told by his actual epidemiologists that we aren’t at the point where this is a crisis. New York may (probably will) need more ventilators, but Dr. Birx specifically said yesterday that the numbers were overstated. Trump is listening to experts when he says things like this. The experts may be wrong (I think Dr. Birx is probably understating the risk), but he is listening to them.
I think that we SHOULD institute stricter internal travel restrictions from major viral outbreaks and we should’ve shut foreign travel down sooner. But the people criticizing Trump are the ones who were celebrating parades and mass gatherings after Trump shut down travel from China to put a finger in his eye.
And instead of actually working with Trump’s personality to try to get this under control (as Drs. Birx and Fauci are doing admirably), they are spinning partisan outrage and making things worse.
Trump is not stupid. He is however a salesman and an eternal optimist. Compared to the rest of the West, he’s done… about average, maybe a little better. I hope he improves, but acting like he’s been exceptionally horrible is incredibly unfair.
Trump, like essentially everyone in politics and media, is a reasonably bright guy with no real understanding of science, technology, math, statistics, etc. Our political/administrative systems mostly select for people who are good at words and factions and power games, rather than at understanding complicated unfamilar things and reasoning clearly about them.
Trump was, AFAICT, about average among US and Western world political leaders in terms of reacting to the virus. This reflects the kind of people we choose to lead our countries–they’re mostly not the right folks for this kind of job, and the same is true for several hops down the chain of advisors and officials.
I’m not an expert, but my understanding is that
(a) ventilators require a lot of intensive and expert handling by trained professionals
(b) people are only placed on ventilators as a last resort
(c) those on ventilators end up dying a large percentage of the time (just a random study I looked up, 44% of ppl on ventilators died in the hospital, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9172858)
(d) those on ventilators almost always end up with secondary bacterial infections
For these reasons, ventilators are not just a panacea that will save lives. Let me be clear, I am NOT saying that more ventilators won’t work. But the ventilators need to be staffed by professionals familiar with their usage. So you can’t just throw 100+ more ventilators into a hospital and expect great results.
This is not to say that other medical equipment is not needed. But the general public and politicians tend to focus on one thing and it seems like ventilators are that thing.
If the medical professionals running the actual hospitals are saying “We need lots more ventilators”, and the amateur politician noted for firing experts who tell him what he doesn’t want to hear are saying “Hospitals don’t need more ventilators”, I’m probably going to trust the professionals on this one. I don’t think hospitals, particularly under a certificate-of-need regime, are prestocked with the largest possible number of ventilators that their staff could possibly operate in a marginally beneficial manner during a respiratory disease epidemic. With more ventilators, they probably can save more lives.
According to MisterA*, Trump claimed governors were exaggerating the number of needed ventilators, not doctors.
How many ventilators do doctors say we need?
* I haven’t seen the show or a transcript of what Trump said, so I’m just going by what MisterA says.
At least twice as many as they’ve already got, apparently. And the governors aren’t making up numbers out of thin air; they’re getting the numbers from their own state health departments.
Okay. And how many are the governors saying we need? If docs say we need twice as many (assuming they’re right) and governors say we need four times as many, then Trump is correct that governors are exaggerating the ventilator issue.
Another issue to consider is that a lot of hospitals are ceasing to use CPAP/BiPAP for provider safety.
One of the tools used for ventilation management is CPAP or BiPAP (they are technically different but interchangeable for this conversation). We carry CPAP devices on the ambulance because, for certain categories of severe CHF and asthma it works well. Additionally, they allow us to avoid intubating patients. Intubation is associated with a lot of costs and complications as you noted. And the last time I looked, the NNT for CPAP to avoid an intubation was 6 making it one of the most effective interventions in this category. Because of this great value, in my State (and presumably elsewhere), there’s been a solid effort to push CPAP use for acute conditions down to the lowest level providers practical.
The current concern is that CPAP and other related treatments increase the amount of aerosolization from the patient and the spread thereof. In the absence of a vaccine or healthcare providers who are immune, a decision has been made to minimize the risk to current healthcare providers. Thus severe patients who would otherwise be placed on CPAP or BiPAP are instead being intubated. Note that this normally considered the reverse of what we want to have happen. But it’s what we need to do in order to minimize the risks to healthcare providers.
Is there a way to alterate the CPAP/BPAP masks/machines to decrease the aerosol risk? Could you put the patient in a plastic tent and run the tent at a slight negative pressure or something? (I’m asthmatic, and remember being in an oxygen tent a few times.)
That *sounds* reasonable, but IDK. That it isn’t being done is a strike against it.
The big challenge is getting them on people. CPAP for this kind of thing usually isn’t started unless someone is having a hard time keeping their oxygen saturation up. Unfortunately, people in those kinds of situations are also likely to have some form of altered mental status and not thinking clearly. And you frequently have to fight with the patient to get the CPAP on them.
If you don’t have any experience with a CPAP device yourself (as for sleep apnea), have someone drive you down the freeway, lower the window and stick your head out facing forward. Open your mouth and try to breathe. It’s exactly like that, only moreso. It sort of feels like you are trying to breathe underwater.
Now imagine trying to apply what’s similar to a fighter-pilot mask with 4 straps to someone’s face while they are coughing and fighting you because they are desperate to breathe, the mask makes them feel like they are drowning and they aren’t in their right mind. How well do you think you can do that under a sealed oxygen tent?
Maybe it can be done. But damn. If you were an ethical employer, would you risk your employees’ health on not catching something that way?
I can easily believe that it’s not being done because it won’t work, but I’ll point out that for my entire life, I’ve gone to doctors’ offices where the exam table was like 90cm across and the disposable paper cover the patient was supposed to sit on was like 50 cm across. So I’m skeptical that there’s not low-hanging fruit here somewhere.
As I understand it, CPAP/BPAP masks would be useful for a lot of COVID-19 patients, but the problem is that they’ll spread virus in an aerosol as the person exhales through the valve in the mask. I’m not too familiar with these masks, and I’ve certainly never tried to put one on a panicking patient[1]. But it seems like there could be some way to modify the masks to decrease the aerosol risk to an acceptable level, and if so, it would be awfully useful. Further, it seems like this might be doable in a field-repair way, rather than in an “go back to the drawing board and redesign this equipment to avoid this problem” way. If so, it seems like it might save a fair number of lives.
I’m not sure what this would look like. Any ideas?
[1] I’ve had asthma my whole life, and have been in the hospital very short of breath several times, though, so maybe I have some insight into what this might be like.
How hard would it be to do some kind of telemedicine for running the ventilator? You have a remote expert who’s consulting over a video chat with a local nurse or assistant, who is told what measurements to take and what knobs to turn. Is that at all workable, or is it just too complex to do that way?
With regards to bacterial infections: apparently there have been studies that if you brush an intubated patient’s teeth regularly, their likelihood of contracting hospital-acquired pneumonia (not the COVID19 kind) goes down.
Of course, with the way ERs are inundated, who has time to brush anyone’s teeth, but still.
Here’s an article, for example:
https://www.rtmagazine.com/department-management/clinical/brushing-teeth-hospital-acquired-pneumonia/
(Edited to add a better source link)
I bet brushing a patient’s teeth creates an aerosol, too.
Any complaint about ventilators relating to the government other than complaining about how FDA regulations are inherently idiotic is 100000000% uniformed and ultimately useless. Trump has no influence on the ventilator supply, Congress and Trump working perfectly in concert would only have a 1% annual influence on the ventilator supply. Vent supply is restricted because its a highly specific (and generally not used all that often in mass numbers) medical device that each and every manufacturer (and location of ) needs independent certification to make. This means there are only a very small number of factories certified to make them, and they are only tooled to make very small numbers (because demand is always low). They can switch to making them at max capacity, but this will only tweak the margins. And no one who could theoretically make them en mass would be approved in time.
Yeah, the ventilator shortage is like 95% an own-goal by FDA and bizarre health care economic incentives generally. You can make a perfectly effective ventilator for $100 worth of commonly-available parts (source: MIT, who did this in 2010 specifically for disaster zones/pandemics), but you can’t get it approved for US use for any price. Remaining 5% is an understandable, but very counterproductive desire to push the margins of medical device reliability and general fool-proofing as far out as possible.
How much control does the president have over the FDA? Could he tell them to loosen their approval process on something like this, or would that have to go through Congress?
At least, he could be naming names in his speeches on national TV: “I have in my hands a list of a thousand companies who could be producing up to {{Number}} ventilators per week, but {{Full Name}} from the FDA is stopping them. My good friend Congressman X is trying to unblock these companies; please write your Congressman to tell him to support X’s bill to save your grandma’s life! American industry is the best in the world; let’s get the low-energy FDA out of the way and unleash it against the virus!”
Weird fiction review: The Challenge From Beyond
This was a round robin story by Catherine L. Moore (known for medieval French sword & sorcery and Solar system-set Weird SF), Abraham Merritt (a novelist whose staple genre was “lost races”), H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and someone named Frank Belknap Long. It was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz, then a literary agent, but better remembered for his work at DC Comics long after the deaths of Lovecraft, Howard, and Merritt. It was written in the summer of 1935 for the September issue of Fantasy magazine.
C.L. Moore: George Campbell, a geology professor, is camping during summer break. When an animal disturbs his campsite, he picks up a rock to throw at it, but it’s “Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners.” It’s an age-worn artificial cube of quartz, and inside is a small disc with “Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.” (He didn’t notice this while making camp?) He’s weirded out by how this could exist, his internal monologue running in the channel we call “Lovecraftian”, even though it’s not his turn yet. “could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or—might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world?” He turns off his flashlight… did the cube continue glowing a moment?
Bare summary doesn’t do justice to Moore’s luxurious prose, the positive feature that balances her harebrained plot development.
A. Merritt: Campbell can’t sleep. He gets back up to experiment with the cube. It acts weird when photons hit it, but only if he’s paying attention. “His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube’s heart, if its beat were to wax, until … what?” Much unnecessary detail of sights, sounds, etc. follows, then the object absorbs him.
And he passes the baton to…
H.P. Lovecraft: Campbell’s mind traverses the vast physical distance between where he was and some unknown cosmic destination. It’s scary to not have a body, especially if your internal monologue assumes materialism! He tries to think as he moves, and “Some cell-group in the back of his head had seemed to find a cloudily familiar quality in the cube—and that familiarity was fraught with dim terror.” Because of course he remembers that, as a professor, he’s familiar with the Eltdown Shards, cuneiform-like clay tablets geologists found in pre-carboniferous strata in England thirty years ago. While a few scientists “hinted at” their heretical artificiality (in Lovecraft, do academics ever make clear truth claims rather than hinting or insinuating?), he only remembers something about a cube because he’s also read the far less reputable book by “a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings” purporting to translate the Eltdown Shards. If the Reverend is right (of course he is), on an extra-galactic planet “a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination” gradually colonized their entire galaxy. No technology could let them navigate to other galaxies in person, so in their thirst for knowledge of all space and time “They devised peculiar objects—strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance—which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe,” and when by chance a mind observed one some indefinite amount of time after it landed on a planet, the hypnotized mind will be beamed to the worm-people’s planet, where one of the natives can perform a mind-swap to go exploring the victim’s extra-galactic space-time coordinates.
Fortunately for Earth, it was then dominated by the Great Race, who knew a thing or two about mind transference, so their scientists reacted efficiently and “carefully hid the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace.”
(I love the mental image of tentacled, cone-shaped adventures, wielding weapons and bracing their mighty muscles.)
Fifty million years ago, the beings sent their minds ahead to escape a peril from the inner Earth, and the whereabouts of the cube were lost to Earthly minds ever since. In a delightful bit of self-parody, Lovecraft has Campbell note the length and detail of this “translation” relative to the small number of Eltdown glyphs.
He wakes up and tries to move, bu thoughts like “move my hand” have no coherent output, and his five senses are not what he’s used to. Good ol’ body horror. A fellow being comes in, like a pale grey centipede, and appears to threaten him.
REH:
Campbell mans up (centipedes up?) and thinks of his old body as just a cloak that would have been cast off upon a natural death anyway. What had that life “ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression?” The only positive things in memory were “the physical delights of his former life.”
Bwah?
Campbell also has access to the neurons of the being who left this body, Tothe of the planet Yekub. “Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to…” power! He’s doing the full Nietzsche.
Understanding that the centipede threatening him with a metal box is Yukth, “supreme lord of science”, he kills him anyway. He uses Tothe’s memories to run to the shrine of a floating white sphere and seize it – the god of Yekub! (though why the aliens worship a dumb old sphere for an idol has been forgotten for a million years.) Conan the Centipede kills the nearby priest and glories in thoughts of how he’ll be king now! He, who dared the easy thing no “man of Yekub” ever would, for as an Earthling he is Beyond Good and Evil as the centipedes subjectively think of them! Muwhahaha!
Frank Belknap Long: In Campbell’s body, Tothe walks around like an idiot, frothing at the mouth. His fingers are clawed now?
Meanwhile Conan the Centipede streaks through fern-planted avenues between the cyclopean buildings under the alien sun. Woo, got your god!
Back on Earth, Tothe is overwhelmed by bestial human brain patterns and tries to eat a live fox.
Meanwhile thousands of worm-shapes prostrate themselves as the ex-Campbell undulates toward the throne of spiritual empire.
Back on Earth, Campbell’s body/Tothe dies by drowning and is found by a fur trapper. He finds it much hairier and beast-like than Campbell left it, and dripping black ichor instead of blood.
Meanwhile the divine sphere acts on Tothe’s body, burning with “a supermundane spirituality all animal dross.” Then it communicates:
Whoa, he ended it with a huge Take That to Howard’s intentions.
Well, you don’t read a round robin for narrative cohesion. You want to see the different authors’s styles contrasting in small chunks. And this one is better than most, because not everyone just spews their style onto the page with a straight face: Lovecraft in particular has the self-awareness to make fun of himself. Howard might have been doing the same: Conan the Centipede is a more over-the-top power fantasy than actual Conan, who often showed a code of ethics.
Merritt does the least by far. Moore had the job of creating a character and MacGuffin, so she couldn’t run wild like Howard or Howard. And not having read Frank Belknap Long, his section, while very distinct, has the least to contextualize it. How does an alien not understanding human instincts turn the body into a werewolf? What were Long’s psychological preoccupations as an author? The god sphere’s speech sounds like something Joseph de Maistre would say, but introducing an alien god as a real supernatural authority overriding the intents of REH’s Campbell and enlightening him moves any such influence from right-wing Catholicism to New Age-ism.
Your thoughts? Should I move on to reviews of Lovecraft or one of these other writers?
So according to Howard, Campbell had already sampled all life’s pleasures. What was he getting up to a professor’s stipend?
I also loved that Conan the Centipede, while understanding Yukth’s words, did not bother to pay attention to them. We never learn what he was saying.
That’s an odd example of a plot hole that would make a rollicking story.
“How I sampled all life’s pleasures on a budget.”
“Greetings, alien. I am here to inform you that–”
“Don’t care! *stab*”
What were Long’s psychological preoccupations as an author?
I can’t recall reading a lot of Belknap Long’s work, even though he was a (minor) part of Lovecraft’s circle, so it’s hard to answer that question. He wrote “The Hounds of Tindalos” which is a great story but the prose limps in parts and the characters are cardboard. The central idea is so cool, though, that it’s no wonder other writers have used it in their own Chthulu Mythos tales
While we’re talking about authors playing in each other’s universes, Poppy Brite’s re-write of Lovecraft’s “The Hound” (it is so blatantly “The Hound” re-purposed rather than even an homage that it can best be called a re-write), “His Mouth Will Taste Of Wormwood”, is a lot better than Belknap Long in the lush, exotic prose department because there’s a strong influence of Poe riding along as well, but it’s very 90s (hey, guess what, gay sex exists!) She simply makes overt what you can read as sub-text in Lovecraft’s original (you’ve got two guys who indulge in graverobbing for kinky thrills, a bit of “using femurs as dildos” isn’t too shockingly far an apple fallen from the tree).
Hospital staff instructed not to wear masks, on grounds that it would spread hysteria.
This is peak 2020, or peak something, I don’t know what.
Yup. That’s been happening at hospitals near me, too. It’s *insane*.
What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. Even if it’s supposedly for a noble reason.
Don’t wear masks, they are useless!
…actually, they are useful, we just don’t want a few people to hoard all of them.
…actually, people can easily fix the shortage by making (imperfect, but still better than nothing) masks at home.
There are not enough tests!
…actually, there could be enough tests, but taking the samples is the real bottleneck.
There are not enough ventilators!
…actually, ventilators could be made, but using them properly is the real bottleneck.
At this moment, it makes more sense to assume that everything the government tells about coronavirus is a lie. (Note: Not just American government, most of these “noble lies” seem to be shared widely.) So much wasted time, because the few people who spend their time and energy solving the fake problems could have been working on the real problems instead.
I’ve got some bad news for you. They didn’t just suddenly decide to start lying when coronavirus happened…
I take it you’ve never solved a bottlenecking performance problem before.
+1
There is always another bottleneck behind the last bottleneck. Supply lines are difficulty and not super well understood even by people who specialize in them, let alone government bureaucrats.
Lots of good hot CW stuff in this article by George Scialabba about George Orwell –
What George Orwell can still teach the Left
I don’t really like it when a writer tell us what a more famous dead person would have thought about events that happened after their death (typically the same as the opinion of the writer). It’s an appeal to authority that is not even based on what the authority actually said, but what he is assumed to have said.
Also, the article has a pretty big falsehood by claiming that the US sanctions on Iraq killed many thousands of people, primarily children.
Aapje +1 that was my impression from the article too.
I don’t think the people yelling “social distancing!” online/in other media are aware of how dystopian it sounds.
On the macro scale, only certain classes of people can work from home. Other classes will either have their industries excepted or see their income drop to zero on very short notice.
On the micro scale, being “socially distanced” from others is how low-status people have already been living. Think ASD, think incels. It’s also the description of suburban housewives that caused second wave feminism and hegemonic hatred for suburbs in pop culture.
I’m not saying quarantines are categorically a net loss: they’re an old, tried and true way of dealing with epidemics. But when necessary, we should frame it differently (look! Children have equal outcomes without going to school!) than just didactically repeating a dystopian phrase and attacking any dissent as Trump support.
I live by myself. Social distancing coupled with shelter-in-place orders means essentially sentencing me to solitary confinement for an indefinite period.
It isn’t literally torture because I still have Internet access… but it’s uncomfortably close.
really? it’s only the internet access that is separating this from torture?
Since “prison” is not considered torture, and “solitary confinement” is, it appears to me the distinguishing factor is the “solitary” part. And Internet access is now my only authorized means of human contact.
Well, okay, it’s arguable whether non-wifi-enabled cell calls are over the Internet. And technically I think I could go to the grocery store ten times a day and try to chat with the cashiers, but they’d probably get upset if I dragged that out.
would you rather be in your current situation but with internet removed, or in a prison solitary confinement, but with internet?
@meh, not the easiest choice. I’d hate to give up biking and cooking. But considering how much of my non-social leisure activities are online or could easily be moved there, I think I’d choose this very atypical prison.
@meh
Not Evan, but if you made me choose between isolation in a nice apartment, but with no one to talk to and nothing to do but read or reread some books; and confinement to a small cell, but with the ability to talk to all of my friends and y’all friendly strangers and watch videos and read whatever….for a period of time longer than a week, I’d definitely choose the latter. Not being able to talk to people drives one insane read quick.
I seriously can’t take this site anymore.
@meh, what would you do all day if stuck in/around an apartment with no Internet, no phone, and no one to talk to? Why do you think it’s so unusual we’d choose the opposite?
I’m serious! I’ve been torn away from my social life, I’m very likely not going to be able to interact with any of my friends in person for the next two months. Being able to text, call, and play video games with them is keeping me sane. Essentially you’re asking me, “do you want to give up the view out your window, your comfortable chair, good food, and the ability to take walks? Or would you rather give up your lines of contact to the outside world, your ability to talk to your friends, your primary methods of entertainment, and the capability to continue your studies?”
Is it really that bad? This is all pretty normal for me, and while it can be a PITA sometimes I wouldn’t call it torture. I guess you just gotta get used to it? Watch some Twitch streams maybe? Tidy up or get some creative work done? Learn to cook?
I can’t see my parents, I can’t see my in-laws, I can’t see my siblings, I can’t see my sibling-in-laws, I can’t see my friends, I can’t go to festival, I can’t watch sports, I can’t…
I can go to work and come home and cruise the internet. It’s not exactly horrible, but it’s not pleasant.
Yeah, see what you just described is normal for me. If I have a commitment after work it’s really hard for me to work myself up to leaving the house once I get home.
Heck, sometimes on a 4-day holiday weekend I don’t see anybody at all, or possibly even open a blind to look out a window. Note that this isn’t intentional–I just kind of do what I feel like doing and all of a sudden it’s Monday evening and I haven’t left all weekend and haven’t seen another soul.
Now, all of this is mediated by my ability to amuse myself on the internet–I don’t think I could remotely do this if I didn’t have it–but people complaining about not being able to leave kind of baffles me. I suspect this is just another of Scott’s “What Normal Human Experiences are you Missing?” when people talk about needing to see other people. I like my coworkers and church members just fine and enjoy talking and spending time with them, but I wouldn’t describe any “needful” urge to see them or anybody else.
Granted, I’ve only ever done the just kind of don’t leave the house things for like four or five days, even now, because I still have to get food. I don’t think what I’m doing naturally is remotely like solitary confinement, with or without the internet.
None of them have Skype?
One of the things that occurred to me about the present crisis is how much worse it would be if it were not for the internet.
@DavidFriedman, not sure about ADBG, but I’m able to Skype with my friends. It’s much better than nothing, but it’s nowhere near the same.
The Internet is great. We wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing without it. But I’m afraid that it’s just close to good enough that we’ll be stuck at this point for months… driving people like me who live alone out of our minds. Oh well, for all the problems of psych hospitals, at least they let you interact with people in person.
This is really bizarre to me. You know you can talk to your neighbors from 6 feet away, right? Do you not have neighbors?
Besides which, yeah, you could meet one or two of your friends to walk around some park (outdoors exercise exception) at talk to each other from six feet apart. There was a post going around of a “neighborhood dads meet for a very spaced apart beer circle.”
You can be parked in the same parking lot and communicate to each other from inside your cars.
This insistence that this is solitary confinement is premised on rejecting the people who are actually physically closest to you at this very moment as avenues for socializing, as well as mechanisms other people have already done to keep in touch with friends. (I said below already, this past weekend I went hiking with friends. It was lots of fun.)
Before this, I saw my friends in person maybe one a quarter. Shelter in place has probably increased my socialization (because more people are available at more hours, especially online).
The park I normally walk around in, within walking distance of my house, now has a locked pedestrian gate. After a week or two of being used in precisely the manner you describe.
Yes, I can almost certainly find someplace they haven’t got around to locking down yet, and/or talk the police into letting me off with a warning if they catch me talking do a neighbor during our respective daily walks. But the fact that the government is imperfect in enforcing its “no meatspace social contact with anyone you didn’t already live with” order, doesn’t change the fact that this is their clear intent. And they’ll probably get better at the enforcement. To a bureaucrat, “Just say No!” is safer and easier than thinking.
Evan:
Does “shelter-in-place” mean you can’t go to the store or for a walk?
Not sure about where Evan Þ lives, but it is at least ambiguous about whether we can go for walks here in California. The county just closed the wilderness preserve in which I had been taking my daily walk, in spite of its having seen only limited and in no way dangerous use since the crisis began. And shopping is supposed to be for essential purposes only, so presumably only once every two weeks or so.
And yes, if we’re clever about it then they can’t be completely effective in enforcing those sorts of rules. The rules are still a panicky overreaction by politicians locked in a “something must be done” loop without regard for the diminishing benefits and escalating costs.
I’m in Washington State, just outside Seattle. Wilderness parks have been closed; city parks haven’t yet. I can still go out biking on the streets – the Governor specifically allowed biking and jogging – and that’s actually become easier and safer now that next to no one’s driving.
So the “confinement” part’s not correct. But the “solitary” part really isn’t, outside the Internet. Unless you really like exchanging brief words with cashiers, I guess. And since prison in itself is okay, the distinguishing factor of “torture” seems to be the “solitary” part.
The park closures are inconsistent, though. Most of them are “technically trails still open, only the parking lot is closed.” The few I’ve seen where the actual park is closed is because the only practical way to get there is to drive (and so necessitates the parking lot).
Closing wilderness parks just seems like a nutty response by someone who has no idea what they’re doing.
Ohio’s shelter-in-place order specifically allows grocery shopping, going to parks, or just taking a walk outside, but excludes playgrounds (presumably because kids climbing all over shared equipment is a transmission risk).
Part of the point of the rules is that you shouldn’t. Italy was in a similar situation 2-3 weeks ago, and rumor is everybody was talking a walk on busy streets with a pass saying they’re shopping.
This being said, we should definitely put mental care somewhere in the equation. A round of shopping outside busy hours every couple of days is probably perfectly fine, at least with a mask and lots of hand gel.
Where are they going to get any hand gel? From a distillery? The distilleries can only make 160 proof alcohol mixed with glycerin and hydrogen peroxide, which isn’t poisonous enough for the gov’t.
Truth be told, hand gel is optional if you practice proper precautions. Biggest danger is touching your face by mistake, but if you already have a mask (where are you going to get one?) that’s much diminished. Just get home, wash hands, unpack groceries, wash hands again.
In the UK, at least, the government have granted an exemption to allow distilleries to produce hand sanitiser without paying excise tax even if they don’t have access to the usual ingredients used to denature alcohol.
Soap probably works better than hand gel. It destroys the virus just as well and spreads over the hands more easily, reducing the chance that you miss a spot.
Only out of the house, of course. Sorry if it seemed I suggested gel at home. It’s great for quickly rubbing your hands between bouts of touching stuff (right when you exit the supermarket, for example).
Sure.
I effectively can’t. I’m on a high floor and the elevator is a major transmission risk even with frequent cleanings.
Here in Massachusetts, the guidance is no sports, no gatherings, and stay 6 feet away from people–but going to the park is fine. We live 2 blocks from a big park, and there are the same number or more of people walking and jogging–but the playground is closed, and people aren’t playing soccer.
The stores (grocery store, hardware store, drugstore) I went to are still open.
How is your drinking alcohol consumption?
While I’ve never been a teetotaler or anything like that, my typical consumption of alcohol was limited to holidays and special occasions (weddings, birthdays, funerals). But with this lockdown, I have started to drink daily. For some other family members, it has also gone down. Of course, for those who regularly drink socially, it has gone down. I just feel like having a glass of wine every dinner (and sometimes lunch).
While it’s not difficult to find like toilet paper, I have noticed that supermarket stocks have also gone down…
Unchanged to slightly decreased. I usually have a beer with dinner, then a mixed drink in the evening to wind down. I’ve switched off of ibuprofen, as I mentioned last thread, so on the days I take acetaminophen I don’t drink.
Thanks to the suggestion of those here I went from “just the beer” to “teetotaler” on days I take a Tylenol. That’s been only one day of the lockdown since then, but there we are.
I’m unchanged. I’ll usually have 1-2 glasses of whiskey in the evening, and that hasn’t changed.
Same here, this has been my habit for years. Got any hot opinions about whiskey? I love scotch of all kinds, but bourbon is my choice these days due to price.
I try to keep a bottle of Woodford Reserve on hand.
I’ve got one now. Probably the best widely available bourbon I’ve had.
If you like Woodford, try the Double Oaked.
Second the double oaked.
Woodford also has a nice straight malt whiskey.
The first bottle of Woodford Reserve I got was the single barrel, which I think was 15 years. I lucked upon it in Mt. Airy, on a trip to somewhere else, and bought it without knowing what I was getting.
Damn I wish I could find that again. But the Double Oaked is good.
Get Balcones Baby Blue or True Blue if you can find it. Not too expensive, unique among bourbons in my experience.
McAfee’s Benchmark Ole No 8 is my cheap but drinkable bourbon of choice since I discovered it a while ago.
I’m mainly a bourbon drinker, and Maker’s Mark has always been my go-to “everyday” drink. Michter’s rye and bourbon are my favorite next step up.
I like variety, but my mid priced go tos are:
1) Four Roses single barrel
2) Knob Creek single barrel
3) Wild Turkey Rare Breed
@gbdub
Seconding Four Roses and Knob Creek SB releases.
At a lower price point ($25), Elijah Craig Small Batch is unbeatable, IMO (even the new NAS version).
Highland Park 12 has an excellent value for money (~$30).
In my part of the country it’s at least $45. It’s a weird one: I’ve had a few bottles of it that were amazing, and a few others that were lackluster. I haven’t noticed so much variance in other brands.
I really like Elijah Craig – if I’m splurging on bourbon, that’s what I get. I’ts a very smooth, rich bourbon–at the opposite end of the bourbon spectrum from Wild Turkey. (When I’m not splurging, Evan Williams.) I prefer to drink it as an Old-Fashioned, very plain–just sugar, bitters, and bourbon, maybe with an orange twist squeezed over it.
Cant really do whiskey personally. I like it best with just a small amount of ice. But I have a thing with liquids where I drink them very fast if they are next to me. Thus I end up getting pretty damn drunk and not really savoring much of it.
I try to drink one glass of red wine daily. I’ve been more often substituting with one beer, which isn’t ideal (but is delicious).
Slightly up. I usually have beer or wine with dinner 1-3 times a week, now it’s almost every day.
Up a little, in both frequency and amount.
Unchanged with a very small possibility of slightly decreased. I usually drink half a glass of wine once or twice a year when I’m at a meal where it’s served with dinner, but don’t seek it out; such meals wouldn’t be in my house, and I’m staying home, so I almost certainly would be drinking nothing anyway, but now I’m definitely not drinking anything.
(I really hate being drunk, and don’t much like the taste.)
Unchanged, but I only drink when socially required. So no society, no drinking!
I grew up in a teetotal household, and when I went to college discovered I can’t stand the taste. I can only think of one occasion on which I drank on my own accord. Nowadays it’s pretty much just the occasional party where people will insist that they can mix me a drink where I can’t taste the alcohol (they can’t).
I’ve been interested in experiencing the sensation of being drunk, but I’ve never been able to get past the taste long enough to feel anything.
I don’t know about others, but at the mild level for me it’s rather like being very sleepy – like the effect you get if you stay up 3-4 hours past your normal bedtime. Lowered inhibitions/bad ideas seem like good ideas, all that stuff, just in fairly dilute form. I can’t speak to actually drunk, never been it, but if you want the sensation of being tipsy, IME staying up late works.
If you want to experience being drunk but don’t like the taste of alcohol, just get a bottle of vodka, pour 3-4 shots, and drink them as fast as you can with a chaser of a drink you like. You’ll only have to experience the bad taste for maybe 30 seconds, and if you are a teetotaler, that should be enough to get you pretty drunk.
Funny story about shots…
The last time I drank in any appreciable quantity was at a party with friends, and they insisted that I take a shot of something. I don’t do shots: I spent most of the party taking small sips of hard cider. But they insisted that I take at least one, and we’d all take a shot at once and it would be fun. I asked for something milder than vodka and settled on rum because why not, they all taste like paint thinner to me anyway. Might as well be a pirate.
They gave me a lot of advice, and I vowed I would do my best. I’ve never successfully downed a shot before, but I wanted to give it a good honest try. Just down it as quickly as possible, don’t think about it. I gave my tongue and throat strict orders: no matter what I send you, take it and pass it along. I don’t care what it tastes like.
So there we go, three, two, one, we all take a shot and the rum slides down my tongue (which grits it’s taste buds and bears it) but as soon as it reaches the back of my throat my lizard brain takes over with a decisive “NOPE.” I spew the whole shot in a spray that not only lightly mists my gracious host but also cleans out my sinuses something fierce. It took a good minute to recover enough to apologize. The video they took of it was extremely amusing however.
I don’t know if it’s the taste or just the fact that I have a sensitive gag reflex but I cannot down a shot. If given a shot I take tiny sips until it’s gone: I can nurse a shot for over an hour. And really, I think the gag reflex is more to blame. I can’t even down a shot of soda (too bubbly and burney).
Thanks for the advice though! I’m sure that would work if my throat would co-operate. I am curious how much alcohol would be required: on two previous occasions (including the party I mentioned) my wife has tried to get me tipsy by insisting that I keep drinking (read: sipping hard cider). I honestly don’t know if I just didn’t drink enough fast enough because of the taste, or if my genetics give me a higher tolerance. How important are genetics to alcohol tolerance anyway?
I assume genetics play a fairly large roll, I’m mostly Eastern European genetically, and I’ve always been able to hold my alcohol better than average. I know quite a few Chinese people that get tipsy after a single beer.
That said, slowly sipping cider is almost certainly not going to get you drunk unless you are an extreme lightweight. An average sized man can drink about three beers in an hour and still be under the legal limit for driving.
Alternatively, just pull an all-nighter! I’ve found that getting real tired has similar effects on me to getting drunk, though YMMV.
Similar, except my househould was not teetotal. Alcohol just tastes foul.
I also wanted to try being drunk just once. I can bear cider, so one time on a weekend by myself I purchased a 12-pack and drank the lot in about 5 hours, and took videos of my state a couple of times.
Then I vomited the lot out and went to sleep.
Massively increased. I was a teetotaler, but now I’m getting the equivalent of up to 50 or so microliters of the stuff daily from the herbal drops I’m taking (getting over what appears to be a cold).
Well, I drink socially, so….
Down to nearly zero, because I’ve become a giant hypochondriac over the past month and I don’t want to do anything with any negative impact on my immune system unless I can’t help it.
In normal times, I’d have zero to two drinks with dinner (average ~ 0.5) depending on what the food was and how well it was complemented by a drink. And occasionally a bit of whiskey later in the evening.
Up a bit, but that’s partially because I recently figured out how to make my own creme de menthe, which is very good.
How do you do so?
I use an immersion circulator at ~140 F for 2-3 hours. By volume, in a mason jar in a water bath: 1 cup vodka, 1/2 cup white sugar, 1 cup fresh mint. Adding some Thai basil adds some interesting subtle notes as well.
You don’t even need the circulator if you are willing to wait. Just throw everything in a clean bottle and shake it gently every day or so until you get the strength of flavor you want.
I’m a lifelong teetotaler, so no change.
Haven’t drunk anything since before all this so I’ll resolve to get drunk tomorrow. I rarely really drink alone, and I think it might do me good under the circumstances.
I historically drink maybe one or two drinks per month with significant (less than getting drunk) consumption every six months. I’m definitely drinking more in the last few weeks though. I’m working much longer and harder than usual as is my wife and we have having a drink with dinner maybe twice a week now?
Buzzed now, but not as drunk as yesterday. Tomorrow I also plan to drink.
I give up booze for Lent, so, way down. If it weren’t for that I’d probably start drinking earlier in the afternoon/evening than usual.
I only really drink either at social occasions or sometimes when eating out. Both of those are closed down for the duration, so my drinking has gone to zero.
I only drink socially, and I have been staying mostly at home for the last two weeks, so it’s zero.
When we go out to eat my wife sometimes has a glass of wine and I sometimes take a few sips from that. We are not going out to eat, so my alcohol consumption is down to a tablespoon or so of sherry I put in a bowl of split pea soup.
I was exposed to a presumptive positive and so am currently abstaining. Though maybe I should just get hammered. I dunno.
I’m suddenly curious – have there been any studies of the impact of drinking on the course of COVID?
Largely unchanged. I’ve usually done one drink a day as a mental gearshift in the evening, and while I prefer doing that over a nice meal at a nice restaurant, a glass of wine or scotch at home does just as well.
Way down from “half a drink socially every few weeks” to “what’s ‘social’?”
Down a bit, but partly because I’m using the isolation to diet and work out. Also because I keep trying to place an order for beer for a few days and apparently there are no available couriers.
I thought about medicating with alcohol, but, well, don’t feel the need yet.
Smoothed out. I won’t drink as much in the “virtual pub” with friends at the weekend as I would in a real one (even while playing drinking games to a group viewing of Cats, as on Sunday), but I’m drinking more during the week.
Down to zero, because I usually buy alcohol impulsively, and now all shopping is planned.
PSA: If you made more in 2019 than 2018, don’t file your taxes until July 15:
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/coronavirus-stimulus-checks-eligibility-relief-payment-234022608.html
Absurd. With the exceptions such as stock market income and cryptocurrency exchanges the IRS has enough of this information to make cut-offs on current incomes.
Further PSA from that link: don’t work for Trump. All his businesses are barred from receiving aid. Although I think the bailout is incredibly stupid and primarily benefits the wealthy, workers will receive some fraction of the benefits and those at Trump companies pay taxes just like everyone else. I can’t believe people still think Trump’s a master negotiator who’s looking out for them.
My understanding is that is just that the businesses are not eligible for the bailout loans. I don’t think workers at Trump properties are denied access to the Trumpbux benefits.
What I’m saying is that the benefits which would go to these firms are supposed to protect the job security of the workers. I don’t think they’re worth it but they do do that to some extent.
The 3 top countries for COVID-19 cases, in ascending order, are Italy, China, and USA. ICU.
This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Except now it’s UCI. You know what this means, University of California Irvine obviously made and let loose this virus!
F**kin anteaters…
Huge slam on anteaters out of nowhere!
Speaking of anteaters…
If no one else is gonna link it…
Expert Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters
Do we more commonly engage in abstract lies about ourselves than did our peasant or hunter-gatherer ancestors? Abstract lies about oneself can be distinguished from concrete lies about physical objects, for instance, a butcher will try to sell you meat he says weighs 5 ounces but really weighs 4.5 ounces. They can also be distinguished from lies where there is an obvious intention to steal something, e.g. “let me into this warehouse where I totally was given access by the boss.” They can also be distinguished from lies about one’s willingness or abilities to do something concrete and real. An engineer gets hired to design a building and a month later has no design for a building, for he’s not a real engineer, and so takes the month of wages and runs.
Abstract lies about oneself include lies about our beliefs, personalities, hobbies, diets, usage of substances, spending habits, financial situation, sexual histories, popularity, ect. Now we may not like to call them lies, but to a martian, it’s a simple matter: we say things which are either not true or if technically true are phrased to give a misleading impression. We do this in any contexts:
1. We lie in interviews and college applications about our personalities in order to fit into the cookie-cutter ideals they desire.
2. We lie in courtship to make ourselves seem higher-status.
3. We lie to our family and friends to make ourselves seem higher-status. (Many who will gladly admit to the above will say no, no, I’m completely honest about what a loser I am to my friends.)
4. We lie about our beliefs to fit in with political or religious groups.
Second question: will our descendants engage in this behavior more frequently or less frequently?
Do you really have to ask whether or not cavemen lied in order to get laid?
Real question: is there any particular reason you expect this behavior to be significantly predicted by time? I’d imagine the within-group variation at Time A to dwarf any global or local rate variation with Time B – that is, some people will be more prone to this and some less at any given time, rather than the people of Time A being usefully more or less prone than those of Time B. What the comparison groups are may matter, too – are we looking at residents of geographic areas, or biological descendants, or culturally continuous societies, or what?
Interesting post. I’ll be glad to see how it plays out. For the record the two most ubiquitous of what you term abstract lies are: “I care” and “I am better (morally) than I am.”
A hint as to how this works is that for the most part people do not explicitly realize they are lying. IMO the reason humans developed large brains is because they are effective at self deception…and self deception is difficult to achieve. For instance, no one really believes in god, but some (many) actually think that they do. People also think they love others. They don’t.
Will it get more frequent? Yes, we are evolving to reward the best liars.
Typical minding.
I would call it “atypical minding.”
HH is a nihilist who is very committed to that position and also (if I understand what he said recently) terminally ill. Allow that to inform whether you want to engage or not.
If it makes any difference I am no more “terminally ill” than any other 71 year old. Given my conditioning and life style I suspect my life expectancy is above average.
You can label the statement or ignore it. It amounts to the same thing.
Interesting question! I go with less lying in premodern societies, since everything used to be more tight-knit and lies would be discovered more readily. Nowadays, you can hide some of your traits very easily from everyone around you (your friends do not know what you do at work), but in a village where everybody knows everybody this is not possible (everybody knows John’s crops are inferior because he likes to work at a leisurely pace).
Insert Pratchett Hogfather quote here.
Also insert the entirety of ancient mythologies here, not in the “gods are lies” sense, but in that the characters of the ancient mythologies did just as much status signalling and popularity politics as the modern day, but with more blood feuds as a result. Tell me what common modern lies exist today that don’t in the Iliad.
Abstract lies are most likely even older than fiction, which is the epitome of it.
From a newsletter I receive by a writer named Claire Berlinsky — apparently there are Russian military vehicles riding around Rome, ostensibly to provide foreign aid of some kind, but….
https://www.linkiesta.it/2020/03/coronavirus-russi-conte-militari-italia-aiuti/ (in Italian)
And NATO uneasiness/displeasure: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-russia-eu-idUKKBN21D28N
Anyone know more about this?
Some people have been speculating that the high death rate in Italy could be because Italy more liberally attributes deaths from secondary causes to COVID-19. A new analysis finds a huge increase in additional deaths from the normal background rate, 4x-10x higher than the amount officially attributed to COVID-19. This analysis is limited to a few towns in a region that was especially hard-hit, and the same effect may not translate nationwide. However, this makes me doubt that Italy‘s numbers capture all related deaths. Maybe this is some early evidence for the widely held fear that having the hospitals overrun will lead to worse outcomes for non-COVID-19 conditions.
https://www.corriere.it/politica/20_marzo_26/the-real-death-toll-for-covid-19-is-at-least-4-times-the-official-numbers-b5af0edc-6eeb-11ea-925b-a0c3cdbe1130.shtml?refresh_ce-cp
They’re saying 700 official deaths per day. Normal death rate is about 1.8k/day…for all of Italy. If it’s really 3x higher (plausible) then we’re talking a doubling of the national death rate.
They show evidence, that in two hard hit municipalities there is an excess death rate of 4x and 10x the rate we would expect in an usual year.
On the one hand, there might be cofunders at work, like another local epidemic that hides behind Covid-19.
It might be deaths not directly related to Covid, like people that would have survived but did not get an place in an hospital (in time or at all).
On the other hand, it might also be that there are a lot of “hidden” Covid deaths, just like there are always more hidden flu deaths than the case fatility rates shows at first.
The “European monitoring of excess mortality for public health action” has had it’s weekly update today, and you can see an off-season mortality peak in Italy alone
http://www.euromomo.eu
The documentation is horrible, probably because the details being documented are horrible. Weeks can begin on different days of the week? Then using week numbers is misleading. What does the blue mean, not final data? The documentation seemed to say that it was only for incomplete weeks, so that only the last week should be affected, but the map shows 4 weeks of preliminary data. And Ireland shows 4 months of it.
The map shows no effect through week 8, then weeks 9 and 10 are between 5 and 7 sd high. But that’s no worse than the flu was this year, for all of January, and much better than the flu was in many countries in January 2017. I assume that these numbers will be adjusted way up, though maybe it’s just a provincial problem. And, again, I don’t know weeks 9 and 10 are: if week 10 is defined as the last 7 days, it’s the worst, but if it ended 22 March, week 11 will be even worse.
Now weeks 9 and 10 are showing nothing. Maybe week 9 means something different than when I last looked, but it’s pretty weird that week 10 has been downgraded; and not just downgraded one tier, but two (from 5–7 to <3). Week 11 is showing normal flu in Italy and weeks 12 and 13 are showing even higher, for both Italy and Spain. But still the national averages are only as bad as the January 2017 flu.
I finally got a chance to review the Imperial College COVID-19 study and I’m worried that decisions are being made somewhat poorly.
I read through the study, plus a number of cited articles, articles they cited, and did a bit more searching. And there are a *lot* of assumptions baked into that study which don’t seem to be well-substantiated to me. I started looking through the data and charts, trying to get a feeling for the impact of what mattered and what didn’t. Then I started finding oddities.
The first one was a weird combination: that closing schools alone provided only a 2% mitigation (whatever). And that a combination case isolation, home quarantine, and social distancing of those over 70 would provide a mitigation of 49% (whatever), but that combining those two items might only provide a total mitigation of 19%! If the number had gone up or down a few percentage points I wouldn’t have been surprised. But cut by a 30 percentage points!? See: Page 9, Table 3, R0=2.2, Trigger=100.
Then I started looking at the projected charts. Notably page 10, Table 4. Scary stuff. But this is all based on a model where 1 month after the rest of interventions have been performed, those over 70 resume co-mingling with everybody else. It also doesn’t chart values for school closure + case isolation + quarantine *without* general social isolation. It also doesn’t have a way to separate general social isolation from “shut down all non-essential businesses”. What if we extended the +70 social distancing for 2 months after the end of the rest of the interventions?
Then I looked at the assumptions. The assumptions aren’t inherently wrong, but they also don’t seem to be well-supported. For example, the model for “voluntary home quarantine” projects:
Some other paper I found indicated that in order for quarantine to be effective it requires 90% compliance (also an unsupported claim). So what are the impacts of varying household compliance? There are papers written about *how* to improve compliance, and many of them sound cheaper than “shut down the economy”. How would the numbers look if we managed to get 60% compliance?
I’ve not been able to find the software or model data somewhere I can explore these options.
Might others take a look at this and see if I’m missing something obvious? I’m worried that this was the first set of pretty charts which was made available and everybody shut their brain off afterwards.
You may find this interesting: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/
It’s set right-wing twitter ablaze, so take that with a appropriate grain of salt.
Notably the new estimate is based on the affect of the lockdown, which the U.S. right seems to be ignoring for some reason
Not a book, but my wife and I have recently been watching the PBS series “The Story of China with Michael Wood”. It’s available for free streaming if you have Amazon Prime https://www.amazon.com/Story-China-Michael-Wood-Season/dp/B072WLQTFN.
It’s a good series. It’s incredible how early and advanced China was. Also incredible how many times things fell totally into shambles after the current civilization was destroyed, typically by “invaders from the North”.
Moral behavior and spending during the pandemic:
For those of us lucky enough to have kept our incomes during this crisis, it seems obvious that we shouldn’t go out of our way to reduce our consumption. Many obvious things that we could’ve spent money on are no longer options, but some remain. As decadent as eating take-out during a pandemic seems to me, is it the morally correct thing to do? The grocery stores seem to be doing fine, but food service is surely taking a huge hit. Continuing (increasing?) spending on these local businesses seems like the right thing to do.
On the downside, am I “forcing” the underclass to put themselves at risk and increase the likelihood of transmission and perpetuating the crisis? Are there other places I should be funneling the money that would have otherwise gone towards consumption? Should I just save instead and plan on making up the spending in a few months?
In the general case, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with shifting what or where you consume – some amount of economic shift just has to happen and while it’s worth trying to make that transition easier for people, it’s not worth trying to freeze everything in place.
In the specific case of restaurants, many are shifting towards takeout and/or delivery where possible – if you enjoy the food enough, treating yourself in this way seems like a pretty reasonable response. The risks are significantly less (as I understand it) than dining in the restaurant. You get value, they get value, gains from trade, hooray!
I’ve donated directly to the local United Way branch that’s got a special fund just for helping people get through the pandemic. Beyond that we’re ordering out for groceries and tipping generously, but I’m largely wary of food service transmission. When this is over I plan on eating out extensively. In the meantime I might just go ahead and buy gift certificates for the places I plan to patronize later. I really want some damn sushi.
According to https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/03/food-safety-and-coronavirus-a-comprehensive-guide.html#avoid-surfaces it’s really hard to catch CV from food.
They have a bit of motivated reasoning, because they are a food blog, but the science they presented seems straightforward. I post it here partially to see if anyone can tear it apart.
Well that’s interesting, and sounds plausible. Given that I don’t know anything about biology. I’ll consider getting some takeout sushi for dinner.
If droplet exposure is a problem, then food that’s not served to you too hot to eat is almost certainly going to be a problem.
According to Edward’s link, it’s not because it’s going through your digestive system rather than respiratory system.
I saw the link, but I’m very skeptical. Your mouth, nose, throat, etc., are all connected, and it seems quite implausible to me that someone infected coughing on your salad would not have a substantial risk of giving you the virus. COVID-19 is apparently relatively fragile and probably gets killed off by stomach acid/digestive enzymes, but putting it in your mouth seems extremely unwise to me.
That article has a good amount of practical, common-sense advice for avoiding transmission via food, but it vastly overstates the case for food being completely safe. They repeatedly state that there’s no evidence for transmission via food, but from what I can tell by looking through the links they cite (some of which simply don’t mention food in particular at all), it’s the “few or no relevant studies” kind of “no evidence”.
The “I’m still not convinced. How could food not be a vector?” section is particularly egregious. The paper they cite makes the point that we don’t know the relative importance of different methods of transmission for respiratory viruses. It certainly doesn’t support the claim that there’s minimal risk even from eating food with virus particles on it–if I can get COVID from touching my mouth, I’m sure I can get it from putting things inside my mouth.
However, I do agree that, if whatever restaurant you go to has good safety practices, it probably isn’t considerably more dangerous than buying food at the grocery store. Depending on your risk tolerance and level of susceptibility, it might be wise to nuke any takeout you get in the microwave and transfer it to a clean plate before you eat it.
When I was younger, I had a doctor who’d served in Vietnam (as a doctor in the Air Force, I think), and the advice he gave me for eating questionable food while traveling was the advice he had given there: make sure every part of the food is too hot to eat when you get it. That’s probably a good rule of thumb for coronavirus, too. If every part of the food is steaming hot when you get it, then that’s probably killed off any viruses on the surface of the food.
I’m wiping down takeout containers with hydrogen peroxide.
We’re doing the same for delivered groceries. I was more worried about infected food service workers coughing on my food, but from Edward Scizorhands’ link that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
With dry goods, I just leave them in a sunny area for 24 hours before touching them again. I figure time + UV + warmth will kill any traces of COVID-19 within that timeframe.
broblawsky:
I’ve been trying to work out how long the virus persists on surfaces. The best study I know said three days on plastic and less on other surfaces, but it definitely depends on the initial dose of virus-laden droplets the previous shopper sneezed onto your box of macaroni. I think the plastic/stainless steel estimate was a half-life of around 6-7 hours. I’ve been using the rule-of-thumb of three days, but I wonder if it should be longer.
This comment on the masks thread lists that study and a bunch of other studies and discussions of the issues.
I am leaving things, including mail, on the porch for three days, but where the surface is all cardboard I may reduce that to one day.
Yeah, donation is a good start (definitely where my family and I started), but now I’m trying to consider the tradeoff between “patronize local grocery store and make food at home” vice “patronize restaurants I like”. Being stuck at home makes cooking preferable in some ways, since I’ve certainly got the time. I just worry that some places won’t be able to make it through 4+ weeks of being shut down.
The gift certificates idea is a good one! Thanks for that. Good way to get the best of both worlds. 🙂
Ask about gift certificates before buying them. Some places have them handled externally and don’t get the cash until you redeem them.
Not at all obvious to me. Ask yourself, why are we richer than our ancestors? It’s not because we have more greenbacks. It’s not because we have more jobs. It’s not because we conduct more trades. It’s because we produce more. Spending does not make us wealthy. Production makes us wealthy.
If you want to help others, donate money.
I’ve kept my modest income but even before this my instincts required me to save most of it and if I were ever going to change that, now is definitely not the time when I would.
We are a month in to a crisis, just because you have kept your income to date shouldn’t convince you of its permanence in anyway.
I also can’t tell you what to morally value, but I think I have a moral responsibility to my family, and that requires me saving and doing my best to keep them safe during this period of uncertainty.
> For those of us lucky enough to have kept our incomes during this crisis
What does luck have to do with it? I selected a good-paying career knowing the prospects, including that international competition was possible. But that it also lets me theoretically work from anywhere in the world. Granted, I was mostly worried about localized flooding and having to crash on a friend’s couch for a few weeks and not a pandemic. But some of us actually planned for things. Why should we remotely treat this as luck?
When you were deciding on your career, you actually considered the risk of “government issues a decree literally prohibiting me from working for an indefinite amount of time”?
It doesn’t have to be that specific. “In an emergency how important is my job and/or how likely am I to be able to continue doing my job?” That emergency can be many things: war, natural disaster, domestic rioting, having octuplets. Right now it happens to be pandemic.
Many people consider for careers that won’t tie them down to a specific place or to current cultural trends that aren’t necessities.
1. It’s a turn of phrase
2. It’s more concise than, “For those of us, who through a chaotic and complex combination of personal gumption, genetic factors, and societal coincidence, have kept our incomes during the crisis….”
Regardless this seems ancillary to the question I was asking.
That seems a bit rude. There are many jobs in our society which cannot happen during a pandemic, which are perfectly reasonable to have 99% of the time and I am actively glad exist. Are you telling e.g. waiters, “you fools, don’t come crying to me when the country shuts down in a crisis and you lose your income, you should have prepared for this scenario by getting a job that doesn’t require in-person interaction”? If they all followed your advice, there wouldn’t be any waiters! Or travel agents, or movie theaters, etc.
> That seems a bit rude.
Taking my money is even more rude.
“If they all followed your advice, there wouldn’t be any waiters! Or travel agents, or movie theaters, etc.”
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. But your conclusion is false. People who take such jobs could limit themselves to people in households where there is a separate and more reliable source of income. So held by teenagers or one member of married couple while the other has a more critical job. Alternatively, they could have a reserve fund so that they don’t need money to be taken from others to support them in times like this.
Again, I think you vastly underestimate the number of jobs affected, and vastly overestimate the number of options people in these jobs have. It’s not a small subset of “risky” jobs that are being affected, it’s a huge swath of the economy. I did some quick calculations from this table of occupations in the US, and it looks like about 38% of the labor force has jobs which cannot be moved online. (I assumed that anyone under the “Management, professional, and related occupations” and “Sales and office occupations” headings can work remotely, and that anyone in “Service occupations”, “Natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations”, and “Production, transportation, and material moving occupations” cannot.) And I’d certainly hesitate to call e.g. construction workers, electricians, and the entire service industry “non-critical” to society, even if their jobs can and must be suspended in a crisis like this.
Furthermore, this pandemic is an extreme edge case. The normal things that people think about when considering “job security” completely outweigh tail risks like this in any reasonable calculation of “how likely am I to lose my job due to unforeseen circumstances beyond my control?”
Many people in the 38% do not have the option of working in an office job, even if they wanted to. I’d guess most jobs that can work remotely require a college degree of some sort, and not everyone is in a position to get one of those. “Try being born in a higher socioeconomic bracket!” is not actionable advice. And if your partner (assuming you have one!) is in the same boat, then your advice to make sure they have a “more critical” job is also useless. Likewise, having a “reserve fund” is something that only works if you’re not living paycheck-to-paycheck. Just because you make enough that you can comfortably put a decent percentage of it in a savings account, doesn’t mean everyone does.
Hi Nick,
Continued from your reply. Forgive the word count!
—
Granted, arguendo :
– The words have no meaning on their own
– The facilitative effects of our shared language, even our shared religion
– We can sufficiently describe our thought patterns to one another
– Thought always involves matter – the intellectual aspect thereof remains under discussion
—
1. Disagreement is a state of immaterial formal indeterminacy
We begin by recognizing that our (arguendo) immaterial thoughts are taking different forms – they are formally incompossible. I am specifically using your terminology, and very deliberately withholding any description of matter from this initial statement of fact. The immaterial forms are incompossible, to the degree that you think my thought-pattern is dismissible out of hand.
Thus we need not contemplate unusual hypotheticals – let us discuss our very disagreement. If we two intellects can contemplate the same concepts and arrive at formally incompossible answers, then we ourselves are in a state of immaterial formal indeterminacy.
2. Determinacy, as described, requires exclusive correctness
You may object that the intellect need only produce determinate forms and need not be determinate in the sense of correct. EG, if I look at a parabola and think “modus ponens” instead of “squaring,” my intellect has produced a determinate but incorrect form.
However, that would mean the intellect was only applying a pattern. At worst, that would be déjà motif, at best it would be epistemic induction. But if an apparent form can be updated, modified, or disqualified, it was never truly a form to begin with. Perception of a pure form is a permanent and unmodifiable state. Therefore “epistemic induction” and “déjà motif” are incompossible with “determinate thinking.”
You may object that the intellect could produce determinate forms that may be compossible if located within some hierarchy. EG, Newtonian physics is a special case of a more generalized physical model, either general relativity or quantum physics. But that would permit every thing to be the expression of a unique determinate form locatable within some hierarchy. EG, my door does not express the pure form of a rectangle, but that is because it is expressing the hierarchically-locatable form of a door shape. This is too determinate to meet Feser’s conception of determinate ; furthermore it is isomorphic to epistemic induction and/or déjà motif.
3. Formal indeterminacy is localized to the material, not the immaterial
The formal indeterminacy must come from somewhere – where does it come from? Whether one of us is right or both of us are uniquely wrong, there must be some way in which we as persons differ.
We cannot localize that indeterminacy to the intellect itself, because the intellect cannot contain the indeterminate. The indeterminate can only be localized to the material. Therefore, we must localize the indeterminacy not to immaterial intellects, but to our material configurations. My brain is different from yours, so I might arrive at different conclusions from you.
4. Informational and sequential bounds of the immaterial
But that means the brain’s limitations are the intellect’s limitations, in that the intellect could only contain what the brain was able to perform. Since the intellect produces the final form of thought, this means the immaterial must be downstream of the material in terms of mental operations.
That seems prima facie uncontroversial – of course information must pass through some unconscious material system before the intellect apprehends it, for the mind cannot perceive what the eye does not first see.
The intellect’s function (assignment of form) is also upstream of conscious perception. Ontologically, the assignment of form by the intellect must precede the conscious perception of the assigned form, even if both were totally immaterial. Biologically, both the assignment and perception of form occur as thoughts, and we agree that thoughts must always involve the material operations of the brain. The brain’s perceptive-type material operation can not begin until the assignment-type material operation has completed.
5. The involuntary action of the intellect grants me permission to perceive a form, even when you do not perceive that form
Return to forms – I will describe the form of this informational process. Insofar as Feser is correct, I am not simply permitted to recognize and apply forms, my intellect demands it, and performs this function involuntarily. If we take the same inputs and you do not perceive the same forms, then this is the very problem we are discussing. So you must postpone objections to my perception of form, at least until you hear me out and grapple with it.
6. Mental operations are formally computational (syntactic)
Feser described computation in From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature : “the transition from states that can be characterized as embodying an informational input, via states that can be characterized as the embodiment of an algorithm, into states that can be characterized as the output of the algorithm.”
And, the informational property described above (the mind cannot perceive what the eye does not first see) can be restated “the informational content of an output cannot exceed that of the input.” Qua Mayfield via Feser, this is an essential property of a computation.
The form we perceive as pertaining to mental operations is : information passing through a component material domain, then through a component semantic domain, then comprising a conscious output that is of no greater informational content than the input. Thus we must recognize the form of a computation.
(Or, a syntax. Syntax and computation are near-synonyms, and Feser uses them relatively interchangeably. But syntax allows for less confusing vocabulary. Permit me to transition thereto.)
7. The immaterial is subsumed within material syntax and subject to its limitations.
Ontologically, the intellect precedes the output state, and biologically its very existence is dependent upon material syntactic processes. To claim that the intellect is operating independently of that syntax would render the brain’s operations as unnecessary as a waterfall. Another way to say this is : the only way the intellect can operate or access itself is via the material. Therefore, the intellect is embedded within the mental syntax.
The mental syntax into which intellect is embedded contains both syntactic/material and semantic/intellectual components, but its overall form remains syntactic. Therefore its output must take the qualities of a syntactic output. The essential heart of Feser’s argumentation is that an indeterminate syntax can not evolve determinate thought. Thus, he must conclude that the intellect is effectively indeterminate, because it cannot escape syntax – neither in terms of its sequential position, nor in terms of its composition, nor in terms of its access.
IE, it is not simply that using Kripke’s calculator produces incorrect syntactic outputs that must then be interpreted semantically. It is that each of us constitutes a Kripkean calculator containing syntactic/material and semantic/intellectual components.
8. The material is a bound on the immaterial, in terms of information content and also determinacy. Whether or not matter or thought are determinate or indeterminate, the same category must apply to both.
Hey, I’d like to jump back into this discussion and avoid splintering into different threads. As of the last time I was talking about this, I had read through part of Feser’s article on “Immaterial Aspects of Thought” and was trying to account for “aboutness” as something dependant on causal connections to the referent.
If you don’t mind me possibly circling back to square one for a minute, could you and/or @Nick try to explain exactly what you (and Feser) mean by “determinate”, as opposed to “indeterminate”? I’m picking up from context that it’s something to do with the contrast between abstract, often mathematical statements; and real matter or observations or calculations in the physical world. But I still am not quite grokking what concept the words are pointing at and I think some kind of definition (intrinsic or extrinsic is fine!) might help clear up my confusion.
That’s very meta! Nick, please correct me where I am wrong. I don’t necessarily agree with these ideas so it may be difficult for me to express them from within.
Helpful sources :
1. Feser’s Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought, as you mention
2. Feser’s From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature spends a lot of effort explicating the Aristotelian terminology
3. Ross’s Immaterial Aspects of Thought is critical source material for Feser’s arguments
Ultimately, it seems to come down to teleology, which finds practical expression via the instantiation of symbols.
Symbols must be instantiated via the interaction between an interpreting consciousness and the object that it interprets. A thing can not be represented in material nature, it can only be represented within the mind. Even if a book contains the words, “The apple represents knowledge, and the serpent represents evil,” these words are merely precise configurations of ink on paper. Just like any other Rorschach blot, they don’t actually contain symbolic information or intrinsic meaning or intent.
The book, the document file from which it is printed, the printing press that makes thousands of copies – all of these are dumb to the concepts of “knowledge” and “evil” and have no intentions themselves. They are simply performing procedures. This is what it means that the material is indeterminate. Material syntax can only perform a certain kind of information processing that is, at its heart, merely procedural. And procedural actions cannot in and of themselves contain the representation of form.
In contrast, the intellect perceives determinate forms. The most common examples thereof are mathematical operations such as addition, and logical operations such as modus ponens. These are things that have one single way of being, which is born from an intrinsic directedness or intent. The Aristotelian terms are “substantial form, implicit in immanent teleology.”
Feser’s (Ross’s) assertion, then, is that if representation of form exists, and it cannot take existence within the procedure, then it must take existence outside of the procedure meaning external to the material. He suggests that information is computationally evolved through semantically-dumb states via material syntax, but that these states are imbued with intent and form via an intellect which is intimately immanent with the material syntax and yet at some remove from it.
—
I object to certain of those, or certain applications thereof.
Substantial form does not require indivisibility – we can apply Aristotelian holism also to configurations. The liana vine may contain the teleology of “vine,” but its individual fibers do not, and its individual cells do not themselves possess the teleology of “fiber,” and the individual proteins do not themselves possess the teleology of “cell,” etc.
Moreover, immanent teleology requires a thing’s configuration (or, a configuration) to be the real cause of all its operations. If teleology is at some remove, then it is not truly immanent.
Another helpful paper is Michael Tkacz’s Thomas Aquinas vs. The Intelligent Designers – What is God’s Finger Doing in My Pre-Biotic Soup? You may or may not be a theist. Even if you are not, his notion of the cosmogonical fallacy is essential to the discussion of consciousness and materialism.
Ask for the textbook used by AP World History classes as a starting point.
Trauma over their prices? And the modern situation where textbooks are a bit of a self-promotion racket.
The pre-Internet answers would have also likely cited the common encyclopedias.
I specifically recommended AP World History because it’s a euphemism for “Non-European World History,” and there’s value to getting a direct comparison to the other cultures/nations while you’re at it (particularly, India and the Muslim empires).
If you’re just learning for yourself, this really isn’t a big deal.
I used to do this to study for CLEP tests. I’d buy and read a “two editions out of date” textbook on Amazon. Typically you could get a used, in decent condition one for like $10.
Which of y’all are fine or prefer to eat the exact same thing every day? Have a regular restaurant that you have a regular order for?
And which of y’all have a strong novelty preference in meals? (Me. I dislike eating anything more than 3 times a week, much less more than 3 days in a row, and I visit the same restaurant maybe once a quarter.)
I guess I’m somewhat in the middle here. I don’t want to eat the same thing more than once every 2 days or so. But I could pick like my five favorite things and eat nothing but those indefinitely.
I can eat the same thing about 3 days in a row, if it’s good enough. I made a gumbo for meal prep lunches a few weeks ago and by the 4th day I was pretty sick of it, even though it was excellent.
I’m the same way. I love leftovers the second day, and I can usually take them the third, but not really past that.
If you asked me I’d say that I prefer to eat different things. In practice, I can go for a few months at a time eating the same two dishes in rotation.
I only eat out on special occasions, so to make grocery shopping and cooking easier I typically make a base food that I can make variations out of. I cook up a mess of black beans, onions, and a few spices and I stick it in the fridge. Then I eat bean burritos for dinner one day (just add tortilla, salsa, and cheese), nachos another day, and noodles another day (noodles, store-bought sauce, and a heaping helping of my bean mix thrown in). So it’s three different meals, but they’re all mainly beans. And I’ve been able to keep that up as my main dinner rotation for something like three years now, so I guess I don’t actually need much novelty.
My wife will eat the exact same thing every day for weeks, and then she’ll burn out on it and move to something else. And she hates my bean-mix! It makes cooking for her frustrating: by the time I’ve perfected a dish for her she’s sick of it and I have to start from scratch.
I like one serving of leftovers, but more than that and it doesn’t matter how good the food is, I’m almost certainly tired of it.
The only thing that I can think of that wouldn’t fall under this is that I’ll have a bagel and cream cheese for breakfast a few times a week, and I usually won’t get tired of that.
Eat pretty much the same thing for breakfast and lunch every weekday. Some fruit(apples, bananas, oranges), and oatmeal.
Dinner is always different but the formula is the same mostly vegetables, a grain (brown rice too often), and tofu/eggs/fish
I’m a bit an extreme creature of habit. There was a period of four months were I ate 3 apples and 3 eggs for breakfast and lunch.
I have a pretty small repertoire of meals, but usually I don’t eat the same thing more than twice a week for dinner. Breakfast is pretty much always the same (a bagel and maybe a banana). Lunch often the same thing 3 or 4 times, or dinner leftovers. I often order the same thing at restaurants but I rarely go to the same restaurant regularly, except the pizza place I get lunch from often.
Robin Hanson: Variety Seems Social
The majority of media I watch to entertain myself, I do not talk about or show to anyone. Nevertheless, I definitely need variety there.
Too many counterexamples for this theory to hold water. For example, going to the same restaurant or bar so often that the staff is part of your social circle.
I’m happy to eat the same thing a few days in a row, and I have a pretty repetitive diet overall. I have a few dishes that I cook identically almost every week, and some that are basically small variations. When I go to a restaurant multiple times, I generally eat the same 1-2 options every time. But I don’t go out of my way to go to the same restaurants again and again.
I’m not opposed to trying new things, but I certainly don’t go seeking out novelty. This was different when I was younger, but by now I feel I have tried most interesting things and discovered what I like and what I don’t.
In contrast, my tolerance for repetition seems to have gotten smaller. I used to be able to eat the same thing for lunch for a couple of weeks (pasta salad, an 8-pack of hot dogs, etc.), but now I don’t. Some of the dinner options I used to enjoy have also become less enticing.
Maybe this is just a metabolism thing, and I just need to exercise more.
I try not to eat the same thing twice in 3 days, but beyond that I can happily rotate most of the time, with something different once in a while.
I am happy to eat eggs prepared the same way every morning for a few years, after which I generally need to change how the eggs are prepared.
There are some foods I would miss if I didn’t eat them for long enough, but it takes me a while to get sick of anything
For simple things, I am less likely to get sick of it. The more elaborate the dish is, the more likely I am to get sick of it.
For example, as a kid, I was willing to get all my calories from bananas. When I moved to the south of Spain, I ate oranges as a snack every day for years. The only reason I don’t eat oranges anymore is that the oranges they sell in the supermarket don’t compare to locally sourced Spanish ones. When they are in season and fresh, I never get sick of apples, tomatoes (with salt and olive oil), strawberries, etc. I could also handle eating an avocado a day for the rest of my life, no problem.
It’s the more elaborate dishes, like salads, soups, and anything that requires more than one ingredient I get sick of. Excluding combination of a food + oil + salt, that’s OK.
I tend to eat the same thing every day. The biggest thing stopping me is worry about whether it is healthy or not, rather than any strong innate desire for variety. I’m also a picky eater, so whenever I go to a restaurant, I usually just find one thing I like on the menu and order that every time I go to that restaurant. I hate going to restaurants I haven’t been to before, since I can’t be sure whether I’ll like the food or not.
I’ve had literally the same thing for breakfast (overnight oatmeal and an apple) every morning for close to two and a half years now (with a few exceptions when I was traveling for the holidays or when I forgot to prepare my oatmeal).
I eat at lots of different restaurants and eat lots of different dishes, but at each individual restaurant I quickly settle on a ‘best’ dish and get that 90+% of the times I eat at that restaurant. At home I have ~10 meals I make and I cycle through them at random. I occasionally make a bulk dish like lentils or pulled pork and have no difficulty eating mostly just that for a week.
I eat a turkey sandwich and spaghetti for two of my four meals almost every single day. For the other two meals, I need to switch it up a little, or else I go slightly insane.
Having a bunch of food intolerances “helps”. Being a bit tired of sandwiches and pasta is much better than getting sick. (Also, I’m very lazy and dislike cooking.)
I like trying different things at restaurants, but that is partly because I hope to find something I like better than the dishes I have had before. I don’t generally eat the same meal at home twice in a row, but doing so would not seriously bother me.
Do you not typically cook enough for leftovers? I suppose it’d be easier for you since there’re three(?) of you at your house; I find that cooking for myself it’s rather hard to avoid leftovers. But then, I’m glad to eat them.
There are four of us, and we typically cook enough for 1-2 person-meals plus what we eat, although it depends on the dish. Most leftovers stay good in the refrigerator for a significant while, so while one sometimes has for lunch what one had for dinner the night before, it’s more common to have for lunch what one had for dinner a couple days before, and save last night’s leftovers for lunch in a day or two. Or have something else and let someone else eat the leftovers. We don’t have them for dinner unless they’ve really been building up.
If we make enough leftovers for four or more people, it’s because we’re making a dish that freezes well, and the extra gets frozen, to be pulled out sometime we don’t want to cook.
I never cook enough to make leftovers, since I don’t like them much. Which also means that I generally only cook low-effort dishes, since I have to do it every day.
I have voluntarily eaten the exact same thing for lunch and dinner (I didn’t eat breakfast) for a little over five months, with no variation, and only drinking water. I rather enjoyed the experience and I think it only stopped because of holiday/travel disrupting my eating habits and then failing to get back on it. It was a ‘diet’ of sorts and I ended up losing about 30 pounds, but I was eating pizza. Everyone has always been highly incredulous of my pizza diet, but conditions allowing I’d start it back up again today.
Variety’s nice, but completely non-essential for me. Sure, it would be great to have a gourmet chef on the household staff cooking an endless parade of excitingly different things, but in fact I have spent extended periods eating mostly in one case humus on toast for lunch and all-day-breakfast-in-a-can for dinner and in another black pudding, banana and satsumas for breakfast and grilled chicken and stir fried vegetables for dinner, and neither diet troubled me unduly.
I couldn’t eat the very same thing, but I’m fine with relatively little variety. I definite have “regular restaurant with regular order” syndrome. Ask me what I order from Chipotle sometime.
My strategy is to fix two of my meals (breakfast/lunch) and allow for variety on the third. I have a high tolerance for sameness. I don’t have the time or energy to constantly maintain the overhead of buying new ingredients for recipes, planning exactly how many meals it’ll last me, etc. My system keeps overhead to a minimum.
Breakfast is always two slices of homemade toast, a green salad, and 3 eggs, with a cup of tea.
On workdays, lunch is always rice and lentils, a small bag of almonds, and an apple. I make a month’s worth of lentils at a time and freeze it in 1-week batches. On weekends it is always leftovers or whatever I scrounge up from the kitchen – usually cheese and bread with some olives or avocado and some fruit.
Dinner is where I switch it up. I cook about twice a week from a rotating selection of things in my repertoire. I always cook enough to get an additional 2-3 meals of leftovers too.
Ironically enough, for when I’m out at restaurants or choosing alcoholic beverages, I always go for something new.
I am okay with eating the same food over and over again, as long as it is a food I like.
I also enjoy novelty.
So if there is a new restaurant, I am happy to try it. But recently I mostly eat broccolli soup, bean soup, and pasta… and I am okay with that.
You mean because Shakespeare invented English?
He just bought the patent from Tyndale.
All of these are pretty scholarly and dense, but very good:
Jonathan D. Spence – The search for modern China: Roughly 17th century until the Communist revolution, focused on exploring the concept of modernity.
Jaques Gernet – A History of Chinese Civilization: This book tries to show you the big picture, focusing on cultural history and China’s relationship to Europe.
The Harvard University Press’ textbook series History of Imperial China has standalone volumes for different time periods and is very accessible.
Honorable mentions:
Henry Kissinger’s On China should be very interesting to people who are interested in American history as well as Chinese.
Feng Youlan’s A Short History of Chinese Philosophy is what the title says, but very strongly influenced by intellectual trends of the author’s time and his own philosophical views.
Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is not really about China as such, but shows its influence on the rest of the world.
I’ve heard good things about Imperial China:900-1800.
(FWIW I’ve never read Tolstoy in Russian, but it’s still good in English)
Whatever San Francisco is doing is very good. SF was approximately equal to NY ten days ago. Now NY is spiraling out of control and SF is basically steady state.
Is it just mass transit? Better social distancing, better messaging?
New York waited about a week longer than everywhere else with significant infections to close schools, businesses, etc. I suspect that is the primary difference.
There are a ton of confounders and it’s too early to tell. I doubt that “steady state” is a good description of the situation when we just had our largest ever daily jump in reported cases (45 new, a 25% increase over yesterday), though of course that could be just more test results coming back.
SF did start its sheltering-in-place order a few days ahead of everyone else including NY, and there is speculation that that might have bought us something, but who knows? The fraction of people tested is different and changing at different rates, the density is different, the age distribution is different, the fraction of the workforce that can work from home is different (and skewed more toward tech which started telling its employees to work from home a week ahead of most other industries), etc.
If over the next week the relevant doubling rates (cases, hospitalizations, deaths) in SF stay substantially below that in NY, that’ll be stronger evidence that SF has done something right. I’m crossing my fingers for that, but have low confidence.
Most likely all the differences are artifacts of testing. Probably even the death numbers; no one was counting pneumonia deaths as coronavirus in NYC in January and February. I would guess it has been spreading pretty much out of control in NYC since January, helped along by density and mass transit.
And shockingly irresponsible messaging from leadership.
I’d love all the people who are bagging on Trump for his messaging not being harsh enough early to give what they think of NYC officials going out of their way to cheer parades and eating out when we had confirmed domestic spread. Mostly to put a finger in the eye of “racists”.
Looking at deaths (which, while more reliable than confirmed cases, lag facts on the ground by more):
California and Washington are looking good relative to the rest of the country, as is Oregon.
NY is a disaster and NJ looks to be falling closely at their heels.
Louisianan’s just as bad as NY if you scale it by population. Their trajectories look almost identical. Georgia looks almost as bad.
Florida, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be doing so badly.
Michigan could get real bad real quick. Ohio looks a little better but still potentially worse than the Western states.
I’ll just mention that, while I agree deaths are (a bit) more reliable than cases, I still think they’re pretty inaccurate, so these comparisons are still very uncertain.
SF is warmer.
Um, not really. I mean, it is in general, but it hasn’t been significantly warmer these past couple of weeks– both places have highs in the 50s/60s F and lows in the 40s; NYC is having a pretty warm spring and SF a pretty cold one by our respective standards.
Yes, it’s been raining most days in the Bay Area, which is wetter than I expect this time of year to be. Good for the plants, but definitely not warm; the house has been getting too cold for me, which is… definitely something.
The lowest recorded temperature in New Orleans over the past seven days was 64, with a high of 88 this afternoon. If that’s anything to go by high temperatures are not a panacea.
I don’t think anyone claims that high temperatures are a panacea, only that they reduce how long the virus can survive outside a host and thus reduce the probability of transmission.
Is it just more people and higher density? Particularly daytime commuter density.
Not exactly what you want (because it is limited in scope), but I never miss a chance to recommend A Chinese Life. It’s a graphic novel (comic book) that’s about as thick as a brick and is an autobiographical account of the author growing up in Communist China. It makes a great primer on that period of history, as it starts with his recounting of his father’s life (who was a communist during the revolution), and it follows the historical and societal changes from the revolution to about the 1990s or so. Because it’s autobiographical and because it’s in a visual medium you really get a a grounds eye view of such a fascinating period of Chinese history: not just learning about the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution or Deng’s reforms but actually seeing how it changed people’s lives. It’s really, really good and I can’t recommend it enough.
Second that. A Chinese Life is a great book, but best taken in small doses (both because of its length and its not-very-happy subject matter).
And if you like A Chinese Life then for fun you could try Showa: A History of Japan which is only three times as long and five times as depressing!
Thank you for this, I’ll have a look at it!
I can recommend the work of Guy Delisle, who was in Shenzhen to supervise animation work, then in Pyongyang because that was cheaper. Also, he accompanied his wife (who works for Médicins sans frontières) to Myanmar and to Jerusalem. He made very interesting graphic novels about all these travels.
Not a book, but I highly recommend Lazlo Montgomery’s China History Podcast.
Thanks, I am going to check that out.
I have an idea that I have not seen discussed.
One of the medicines that some people think might help against Covid is Losartan, a widely used blood pressure medicine which I take. It ought to be possible to mine the data from natural experiments to find out whether that is likely to be true without doing any new experiments at all, and similarly for any widely used medicine.
When you go into the hospital, they ask you what drugs you are taking. If somebody could get the evidence on what drugs people who came down with Covid and people who died from it were on, any drug that makes you substantially less vulnerable or substantially more vulnerable should show up in the statistics. You would have to controll for things like age, and mortality effects might be due to the problem you were taking the drug to deal with, but it would still give you a lot of useful information.
Sure. But if someone wanted to publish that they’d have to go through an IRB. Which is a nightmare. Also, the quality of medical records is surprisingly terrible. Medical records exist to facilitate billing and avoiding lawsuits, not treating patients.
The quality of medical narrative is surprisingly terrible. But parsing text is a nightmare in any context.
However, the discrete data (such as med lists) are mine-able.
Nah, it’s those data too. If you do a PubMed search on ICD-9/10 validation you’ll find all sorts of known problems with even what should intuitively be solid; as a rule of thumb anything other than the principal diagnosis for a given encounter isn’t really trustworthy, and those will reliably be for the most serious possible description of the complaint due to payment incentives.
Dunno man. It’s easy to find whether my patient has been on a given medication. In a larger sense, those queries are easy to build and execute.
This is an admin and research problem, not a clinical one. Once stuff goes through a couple rounds of coding/billing/clarification/de-identificaiton, weird stuff starts happening; I once had somebody who was coded as having died three distinct times over a five-year period. Meds are less-bad since it’s directly tied to reimbursement, but even then you have questions about prescribed vs. filled vs. taken and straight-up mistakes introduced at one stage or another.
It seems like you are describing a wider array of failure modes than we would expect for the OP’s question of : how do we find the COVID-19 patients who had been given losartan while admitted?
But our experiences may differ. Your nick probably indicates that you have had far more opportunities to run into the EMR’s failure modes.
Fair point, I did drift off of the topic at hand.
And yeah – I used to do research using multibillion-record EMR and claims databases, and I’m still a little traumatized about it. Mostly they work fine for what they’re actually for, and they’re obviously miles better than paper forms even if they’re not all they might be yet.
I managed to see one chart where the chief complaint and admitting diagnosis were reversed. So basically everything can and will get screwed up.
What you’d want to use is pharmacy claims data; these are purchasable as de-identified proprietary databases from insurers. I know some of the people who work with them, I’ll have to check and see if anybody’s looking at this after this year’s data become available.
Anecdata on med lists specifically:
With the system WakeMed uses (Epic), it’s very difficult to ever convince it you’ve stopped taking a medicine. This is because it combines data from multiple sources (e.g. your pharmacy, other doctors) and those have lags. A couple of providers I mentioned this to said it’s common for drugs to reappear.
E.g. I tell my WakeMed PCP my (non-WakeMed non-Epic-using) shrink gave me topiramate for appetite suppression, they put that in the system, it tells everyone it knows “Corey’s taking topiramate”, later I tell them I stopped, some other system tells WakeMed “I heard Corey’s taking topiramate” and it goes back on the list.
(Systems certainly could be designed to prevent these kinds of loops, but that doesn’t mean anyone bothered, or that it works correctly)
Has been discussed widely.
Bit of a back and forth at the moment about whether ACEI/ARB increase or decrease risk, or whether they move it in opposite directions. No good evidence just theoretical discussion.
What you describe is possible in a year or so time, when large scale data is collated. At the moment it is too messy, too confounded too haphazard and too difficult
There is an ongoing clinical trial.
Thanks. And they claim they will have results by April 1.
You’d have to do a really good job of correcting for the underlying conditions that people are taking the drugs for.
This may only appeal to my sense of humour, but this cri-de-coeur from the supplier of our payroll software today amused me.
Our government has introduced relaxation of Revenue collections and reimbursement of wages paid by employers who are shut-down but still keeping staff on the books during the ‘shelter-in-place’ portion of the current crisis. This was only formally announced yesterday, but apparently some people are already expecting Done Yesterday When I Only Told You Today for the updates to payroll software.
Having had some slight experience as a minor minion in the public service, things like tax are very complicated and you need time to study what all the ins and outs are about, so I fully appreciate (on both sides) the problems with “the Revenue rules have suddenly changed, we need updated software” as expressed herein 🙂
A figure I saw from the WHO that drove home just how fast this is accelerating –
It took 67 days to get to the first 100,000 cases. It took 11 days to get to 200,000 cases. 4 days later was 300,000 cases.
That was Monday, we are now well past 400,000. We are presumably at the point now where we start adding increasing multiples of 100K each day.
I feel like a big difference between the people freaking out and the people who seem to think this is all overblown is how well they understand what exponential growth looks like as you carry the timeline forward.
Most of the people here, at SSC, saying things are overblown understand exponential growth just fine, in theory. It just doesn’t prevent them from using other known facts as rationalizations.
This is true. I, for example, think most of the exponential growth we are seeing right now is simply testing catching up to case numbers that have existed for much longer. Eventually this will appear as linear growth as we reach a certain amount of testing, and then it will tail off, just because of how testing works.
This natural relationship between testing ramp up and the ramp up of confirmed cases is not reason to rest on your laurels, but it is a reason to not take seriously people who extrapolate based on the exponential phase of the graph and start saying that 40% of America will obviously have C-19 by April 3rd or whatever.
The number of deaths are following an exponential growth curve. That isn’t consistent with your theory.
No its not, but on that part I’d want to see a graphs of deaths and death rates in 2019 (and other years) Feb/March compared with deaths in 2020, because it can also be a testing problem where people were gonna die, and they died in the hospital, which is a place where infections always spread like wildfire.
Optimally you’d prefer to see no C19 patients ever make it into a normal hospital.
I’d like to modify that slightly by saying the cumulative numbers of deaths are following curves that parallel one exponential curve or another for a while. But none of them keep following the same exponential exactly: they’re not straight lines on a log linear graph, but instead they all curve downward to track a new exponential with a longer doubling time, as each authority struggles to bring the outbreak under control. Wuhan’s cumulative deaths may, touch wood, never double again: their doubling time has become infinitely long and their curve nothing like exponential any more.
At which point I’m bored with the cumulative graphs and would prefer to see the first derivative, the daily deaths, which should show a hump and a long diminishing tail. Wuhan’s daily deaths are going down now that they’re into the tail.
I think I understand exponential growth. It looks something like this, right?
Amusingly, no. That’s WAY faster than exponential.
Its just a really large exponent, right? Obviously by next week 110% of the world will be out of work.
No, exponential growth has a specific shape. You could probably model it as a power law instead (because everything fits a power law) with a super large exponent, but not an exponential.
exponential: y = a^x
power law: y = x^a
Eventually an exponential will always outrun a power law, but early on (small x) power laws are faster.
>You could probably model it as a power law instead (because everything fits a power law)
I didn’t pay enough attention in Laplace Transform lessons but I kinda understand signal processing so i’ll use sine waves instead. (because everything fits sine waves)
You’d never get a power law to fit an exponential with a time series that covers several doubling times. It’s either too flat a the start or not steep enough at the end.
@Lambert The Laplace transform is exponentials (and thus, in a sense, is still sines and cosines). The Mellin transform is the one that represents everything as power laws.
Holy shit.
Doesn’t every infectious disease spread exponentially? At least initially?
Yes, in the S-I-R model, it’s buillt in that dI/dt is proportional to I for initial small “I” (“I” for Infected), which is the definition of an exponential growth curve. Later on, that can’t be true any more, as the growing number of former Infected and dwindling number of Susceptible poison the growth curve, even assuming Business As Usual (constant transmission rate).
And thank heavens, the transmission rate isn’t constant, but falls, as governments wake up to the seriousness of the situation and announce stay-at-home orders.
Every math YouTuber in sight is making coronavirus-themed videos, and leaving the word out of the title so as not to be demonetized. I see 3Blue1Brown has another up, time to go look at that.
ETA aand Aatish Bhatia had the brilliant idea to plot the weekly confirmed cases on a log log graph, showing all countries as power-law curves with a precipitous drop off as they get things under control.
https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
Once again, we see country size makes no difference, and lumping or splitting have minimal effect: your biggest bubble hardly changes, and your little bubbles just look younger, which they are.
That’s not to say the effect of a country or region handling an outbreak badly doesn’t show up: it shows up by you drifting into the left lane. You want to drift into the right lane, and take an off ramp as soon as possible.
Obama: “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”
Trump, March 6th: “If you need a test, you get a test.“, unless, of course, you live in West Virginia a week after Trump’s speech, where Big Jim has things well in hand. https://time.com/5805571/james-vigil-west-virginia/ Thankfully a Democratic senator was around to make things right.
And of course “If things don’t go as planned it won’t kill anyone.” wrt chloroquine.
I just want to make sure people remember these statements of Trump.
What’s sauce for the Obama is sauce for the Trump.
I’ll give you the test thing. I don’t think he was lying, though, just misinformed, as there’s zero reason to lie about that. Great, you got him being wrong on something.
The chloroquine thing is ridiculous, though. That’s 100% the fault of the idiot who took the fish drugs, and you would never in a million years hold any other politician to that kind of standard.
If anything misinformed is *worse*. Expanding test capacity is the #1 priority for America right now and you’re positing that Trump is completely clueless about its status.
No I’m pretty sure lying is definitely worse, because just being wrong implies you can correct the issue once you’re properly informed, which appears to be what’s happened with the testing. With the lying there’s unlikely to ever be a correction. I think you’re just bizarrely calling being wrong worse than knowingly and deliberately lying because you’re trying your hardest to bag on Trump.
I’m pretty sure you’re all just politicizing this pandemic, and I hope normal people find it as distasteful as I do and punish you for it at the polls.
If you actual cared about lying, you wouldn’t be a fan of Trump. Trump lies constantly.
You just discount his lies and inflate what you perceive to be lies by those you oppose.
If people cared about lying politicians they wouldn’t vote at all.
A certain amount of lying comes with the territory in politics. All politicians lie sometimes, though of course some do it more than others and some lies are more consequential than others.
The president badly misunderstanding the status of his nation’s most important priority is a much worse sign than the president merely telling a lie (which as you yourself note is something that is not unexpected). It means there’s some critical breakdown in the flow of information to the top.
Oh, really? And you’re not politicizing anything? Even though you’re bound and determined not to blame Trump for anything, while his flawed response to the crisis may cost thousands of the American lives that you claim to weep over so copiously when they happen to be taken by Mexicans?
Give me a break.
No, I can confidently say I’m not politicizing it. I’m not making comments about how great Trump is doing, or how badly the Democrats are responding. About the only thing I’m criticizing is other people attempting to politicize the pandemic.
I think people should vote for Trump because his trade and immigration policies are superior to his opponents. “Because Trump is great at pandemics” is not an argument I’m making.
it =/= anything.
I’m pretty sure “anything” meant “anything about it” meaning “the pandemic.” You, anonymousskimmer, are politicizing the hell out of it, and I hope that karma comes around like a boomerang.
He’s a politician.
To be fair, we read in The Art of the Deal that he lied constantly to get buildings constructed, making him a worse person than politicians who were honest people until they first ran for elected office.
But then there are those who have spent basically their entire adult lives in elected office, so we have to remember that they’re just as bad.
@Conrad Honcho
What do you mean Karma coming along for me specifically?
I’ve made it clear I either don’t like or don’t care about the vast majority of things Trump has done, and I like hardly anything he has said. But I have praised him rarely elsewhere (specifically on signing the bill back in 2007 or 8 dealing with online pedophilia, and I’m leaning that way on getting out of Afghanistan).
I don’t want him talking off the cuff during this event. And I sure as hell don’t want him tweeting about the benefits of a miracle drug, or a miracle Easter. Because right now that karma is coming around to bite other people.
He cannot do a good job during this crisis continuing to do what he has done all along. He needs to change. He needs to get slapped in the face from people he cares about (thanks, Tucker Carlson, though his comments obviously weren’t a slap). He needs to get slapped in the face by public opinion. These are the only things I believe will get him to act the way he needs to act in this time.
How are you deciding what is legitimate discussion and criticism and what is politicization?
I don’t deny that I’m not happy with the job Trump is doing. But I absolutely stand by my claim that it would be *really, obviously, terribly bad* if your explanation of Trump’s behavior were correct and he were just unaware of the massive testing shortage.
I can see how one might differ on the relative badness of deliberate lying versus obliviousness to problems but I hardly think my weighting of the relative badnesses is somehow ridiculously out of bounds or “bizarre.”
Which is to say that I’m going to ignore your refereeing.
I mean, I believe you are trying to use this crisis, which is a real, important, and deadly thing, to push your political goals. I hope your actions backfire horribly, all the normal people see what you and your fellow travelers are doing, are properly disgusted by it, and you lose every single election you’re trying to win with this so badly all your ideas are discredited for a generation. You are doing a bad thing, and should stop.
ETA:
Great, do that. Spread it loud and proud. I hope all the normal people see it, are grossed out by it, and vote against you.
Many successful people in business have a Reality Distortion Field.
Steve Jobs had it. Elon Musk probably has it. Trump had it.
A RDF can be really useful in a lot of places, if you need to change something fundamental. Like if the reality of the world is “no one wants a $500 smart phone with no keyboard” and then Jobs shows up and says “yes they do” and it changes for the people around him so they build it and then he gets people to buy it, and then it becomes true. They might be the only way to get around chicken-and-egg problems.
Scott had a theory that this is a lot of what Trump did for his real estate deals. He needs something that isn’t true to be true. So he asserts it is true long enough for all the principals involved to get on board. And then it is true.
Reality Distortion Fields are great until they aren’t. When they don’t work, you find yourself having gone down a really stupid path. Asserting “there are tests” can work amazingly if the people reporting to you can just be motivated to make more tests, and you have changed reality to match your statement. But if they simply can’t, saying it repeatedly becomes an obvious lie.
In the real estate world, Trump probably had a good sense of what reality he could and could not distort. He’s had to wing it in politics. And a virus doesn’t respond at all to being told to go away.
Thank you Edward Scizorhands.
@Conrad Honcho
My father had a reality distortion field significant enough he sent me a copy of “The Secret”.
My attitude toward Trump is that he reminds me of some of the worst parts (that negatively affected me) of my father, as well as many more bad parts that remind me of people I’ve personally hated over the years.
This isn’t about politics. I think his attitude is bad. Period. And I want it to stop. If he stopped it, while maintaining much of his politics, I wouldn’t have nearly the issues with him as I do now.
Still want a strong case for testing being a panacea. Best evidence I have seen is that it is a marginal way to improve response. Tweaking at the edges. Much more important is social isolation and mass cloth masking if we look at asian countries that are winning.
With good testing, you can go from shelter-in-place to track-and-trace.
Only after you reach manageable infection levels, which places like NY do not have.
I’m skeptical of track and trace being effective in any major metro. For instance, my GF works in an office building, and has been sent home for 10 days. Only today we were informed that someone from her floor has tested +. Thats like 50 “traces” for the floor alone, plus the radiation out therefrom. Plus you don’t get any of his elevator mates, busmates, trainmates, etc picked up on.
Tracking would have had to be a Jan 1 policy for all international travel to quash it, or it will have to be a late April policy to kill the last remnants.
Right. Track-and-trace is useful when you have a small number of cases.
NYC cannot do it now. But they may have been able to do it sooner (given competent local administration, of which I’m skeptical). And there are lots of other areas of the country that could do it, too. If Kansas can re-open for business, good!
I think the issue with that theory is I think like even a place like Kansas probably already has a critical number of cases where if they went about business it would turn bad. I am fairly convinced by arguments that our total diagnosed numbers are going to be extremely low compared to total cases. For instance, the WSJ article made a compelling case that there were more people with C19 in Wuhan Province on Jan 31 than there have been total reported cases in all of China up to today.
I mean, most politicians don’t give out what sounds like medical advise on Twitter, and there’s a good reason for that.
I agree that the person’s an idiot, but you can’t hold Trump completely blameless when he amplifies things like this in a crisis. People are scared! They’re going to make bad decisions, and some people take what he says seriously.
If 1,000 people did it, maybe there was a problem with the message. If one person out of 350 million people did it…yeah that’s that just that one idiot. Everyone else understands he was talking about a medical treatment for humans supplied by pharmaceutical manufacturers and taken according to the directions that come from doctors. Not fish tank pills.
Were you confused at all by Trump’s statements about the drug? Were you saying “hey, Trump says to take fish pills but I don’t think that’s right!” Or did that thought never come close to crossing your mind because you’re not an idiot?
This specific example is such small potatoes in the scheme of things, but Trump is notoriously imprecise with his language. He’s ambiguous and sometimes hard to follow. You usually get the gist, but “the gist” leaves a lot of room for you to read what you want into whatever he’s saying.
This has negative consequences in environments where precise language are required, such as when discussing how effective and safe experimental drug treatments are. There’s clear cause and effect here, albeit filtered through human idiocy. But the more people you have listening to you, the more precise and careful you should be with your language because it only takes one idiot.
Then if it’s small potatoes, maybe ignore it completely instead of making it a top-level Dunk on the Orange Man comment?
“Zero out of 350 million people misunderstand you” is an impossible communication standard.
That you would bother singling this instance out says more about you and the media than it does about Trump’s communication problems.
ETA: btw I understand you didn’t make the top-level comment, but you certainly seem to agree with it.
I made the top level comment and disagree with matthewravery that this is small potatoes.
It is yet one more yuge potato in the stream of yuge potatoes Trump has tossed out over the years.
Don’t mix up two distinct drugs, and don’t downplay the severity of side-effects. Hydroxychloroquine is much safer than chloroquine, though even it can kill or disable people when dosed by a doctor.
Meanwhile pretty much every politician on the left has spent the last dozen years yelling that vaping is as bad or worse than cigarettes and doing their best to restrict them, which has almost-for-sure caused tens of thousands of future deaths minimum. They are wrong-or-lying in a way much worse, but the news doesn’t say to blame them for the massacre so it’s fine.
seen versus unseen
Eating the fish tank cleaner is not on Trump. That’s less than a one-out-of-a-million issue.
But people are trying to homebrew miracle cures, and existing malaria patients can’t get their existing prescriptions filled because of runs on possible remedies. The President should not be encouraging that. He should be doing the opposite.
Sure. I’m taking the general position that, “The President should be scrupulously clear when discussing medications during the pandemic.” That one of the consequences for failing to do so is that at least one person misinterprets him and kills theirself doesn’t mean it’s the only or worst consequence of this.
But “This consequence is rare, so the person who caused it it isn’t responsible” is terrible logic. Millions of people listen to what the President says. People going out and trying to use this stuff was a predictable response from him talking about how great it was (“maybe, we’re not sure, but it’s great!”). That someone mis-used it is also entirely predictable.
He should choose his words carefully. There was no reason to specifically mention this drug or discuss it in such a confusing way.
Yes, being clear is really important. Compare Boris Johnson’s address to the nation with Trump’s. One single poorly worded sentence can cause massive amounts of distress on the ground. You have a comms team review what is going to be said, and double-check it. This President hates comms teams being a filter on him, and so we see things like panic rushes to get back into the country.
And the President should never ever be giving medical advice based on something he heard. I can’t imagine Bush, when hearing people are complaining about respiratory issues following 9/11, suggesting Vitamin D supplements because he heard about it on the news. It’s not his job and not his qualifications and he knows it.
@anonymousskimmer You didn’t even pick a good lie Obama told! The “Syrian Red Line” comment cost ~500k lives.
That wasn’t a lie, so much as being naively optimistic about future policy. Whereas the “if you like your health insurance, you can keep it” was a deliberately misleading description of already existing, known policy, and thus conforms much more closely to the normal concept of a “lie”. (It was technically true in that provisions of the law did grandfather existing health insurance plans, but a lie for practical purposes since insurers mostly stopped offering the grandfathered plans.)
It was a false promise, and most people count those in the same category as outright lies. Which, they are. When you say “If X happens, I will do Y”, and you have no intention of doing anything Y-like in the event of X, then you are lying.
You may think you will get away with it because of your naive optimism that X will not happen, maybe because your “promise” convinced other people to make sure X doesn’t happen. But you’re still lying. It is possible to be both naively optimistic and a liar at the same time.
“If X happens, they will do Y” is more equivalent to Obama’s promise.
“We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.”
That’s Obama promising that Obama and/or the United States will impose “enormous consequences” if Syria used chemical weapons. And if you’re going to claim that it wasn’t a lie because “there will be consequences” doesn’t explicitly say who will be imposing the consequences, then you are either terminally naive or pretending to be.
@JS
While we’re on the topic, do you have an opinion on whether Assad called Obama’s bluff, or if it was someone else trying to prompt US intervention?
I remember this being in question at the time, and I never heard that it was satisfactorily resolved.
Claims that the Ghouta attack was a false-flag operation by a third party trying to bring the US into the war were fairly thoroughly investigated, by multiple national governments and open-source private arms control groups, and found to be not credible. The possibility that Russia had quietly told Assad “It’s OK, we’ve got your back on this” or even “Here’s how we get the Americans to sign off on the Russian Army going into Syria”, are still credible but unproven.
Sorry, my bad. I read too fast and though you were speaking of the insurance claim.
I definitely don’t think Obama did well there, and I suppose criticizing the use of the term “lie” was a bit kneejerk. Making threats you don’t intend to carry out is always a bad idea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/coronavirus-tweet-economy-elderly/2020/03/25/25a3581e-6e11-11ea-b148-e4ce3fbd85b5_story.html
The two cases are not comparable. Obama was telling a lie in order to misrepresent the consequence of the policy he was pushing.
Trump made a false statement, possibly a lie, possibly an error, but it wasn’t to misrepresent the consequences of his policy, since the Coronavirus wasn’t something he was doing. Obamacare was something Obama was doing.
Trump is, as always, an unreliable source of information. But so far as I can see, the only thing he is actually doing that makes things worse is using the pandemic as an excuse for giving away lots of money, something that he, like most politicians, is happy to do. His one significant judgement call was shutting down travel from China, which pretty clearly was correct and which his opponents at the time attacked him for.
Ever since I started taking COVID-19 seriously about a week ago (the exact moment happened while I was watching Contagion) I’ve been wondering if this is anything like what people felt during the height of the Cold War.
Obviously not at all in the same league as wondering when you’ll be ducking and covering to get away from nuclear fallout, but maybe in the sense of there being a looming invisible danger, of seeking safety in hunkering down, of waiting on the word from authorities about what new restrictions each day brings?
For those of you who experienced the Cold War as adults, how much deja vu are you experiencing now, if any?
I recently read a poem directly comparing the two.
Well maybe the early cold war. I am 63 so I was an adult for the last 15 years or so of the cold war. But I think the whole “duck and cover” thing was done in the 50’s when I was a baby. So I think you’ll need someone older than me. I never really thought about the danger of nukes back in the ’60’s through the ’80’s. I was 7 for the Cuban missile crisis and didn’t know about it at the time.
> But I think the whole “duck and cover” thing was done in the 50’s when I was a baby.
Odd. I’m 15 years younger, and I feel pretty certain that I remember at least one incoming missile drill where we hid underneath our desks in elementary school in the late 1970’s in North Carolina. Maybe it’s regional? Or maybe my memory is just that faulty?
> I never really thought about the danger of nukes back in the ’60’s through the ’80’s.
Even stranger. It was a large concern for me through high school in the late 80’s, pretty much until the fall of the Soviet Union in 91. I remember failing on an essay in a US history class in high school (Wisconsin by this point) on the role of nuclear missiles in the defense of the US. The teacher was very Christian and active in the John Birch Society, and had a much more positive view that I did of the wisdom of Mutually Assured Destruction. Certainly I was skittish of odd atmospheric phenomena, and remember being particularly worried about a spectacular aurora borealis.
But for the main question, no, I don’t think there’s much if any similarity between the current coronavirus pandemic and the Cold War. In the current pandemic, one still has substantial control over the situation. You can dramatically reduce your risk of infection through your own actions, and starting in good physical health means the risks are low.
By contrast, if Reagan was convinced that starting a nuclear war was what God wanted (or if the Russians were convinced that they should attack first before he reached that conclusion) it was totally outside your control. I might compare the coronavirus to a fear of driving (where there are outside dangers but you still have considerable control over your fate), and the Cold War to a fear of flying (where all you can do is hope the mechanics did a good job and the pilot doesn’t have a death wish).
Only the late Cold War in my case, but I distinctly remember thinking that just about everybody was either absurdly paranoid or absurdly complacent about a problem they did not understand, with the media leading the charge into stupidity and everyone viewing the matter through the lens of political tribalism.
So, yeah, deja vu all over again.
Any studies on amount of covid19 virus exposure and severity of symptoms?
Good luck on that, while we don’t even know how many people currently have it.
I think there are in fact such studies, which do not require knowing how many people have covid19
So, what are we all going to be doing with our Coronabucks? ‘Stick them in the rainy day fund for next year’ is the obvious, boring answer. Comedy options include buying a flamethrower guitar truck and a bunch of weird leather outfits, also for next year.
Invest it in durable goods, like a bidet.
Who is this “we” you are talking about? I’m not getting any Coronabucks. But feel free to talk about what you’re going to be doing with the bucks I’m going to be paying for you to get.
You know, us, the unwashed masses. I missed that there was an income ceiling somehow – I wonder how they settled on the thresholds they did, I bet that would have been a fascinating time to be a fly on the wall.
I’m not sure Federal revenue and outflow are even slightly coupled anymore.
Thanks John!
Doesn’t most of your income derive from federal contracts? (I’m in the same boat, and it always makes me a little uneasy to play the “I’m paying your whatever with my taxes” card since, well, I’d be unemployed without taxes)
No Coronabucks for me either. Therefore one of you should buy me a case of Dos Equis.
Charity
ETA: Though apparently I’m means-tested out of eligibility. Oh well. They’re good causes. I regret nothing!!
I’m a non-resident alien, I don’t think I’ll be seeing a cheque.
For me, it’s the obvious boring answer. Maybe an extra few bottles of whiskey to help cope with the chaos.
No Trump Bux® for me, sadly. Probably the right decision for the government, because I would have just put them into the stock market, and I’m guessing that’s not what they intended.
What is the Coronabucks income threshold? (I don’t want to go on any more news sites today…)
From the Washington Post:
For single-head-of-houshold, the threshold is $115K before things start to drop of to ~$137K, after which you get nothing. +$500 for each kid. (IIRC.)
Is that gross income, AGI, or MAGI?
Can I have three MAGI and still get my Trumpbux?
From 1988: https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/trump-christmas-cold-opening/n9729 Wait until around 3:40
AGI
Nah, at the 3x MAGI threshold, you just get a a race of Egyptian god-impersonating parasites, a reanimated corpse, and a decommissioned Soviet space station.
EDIT: @Le Maistre Chat
Do I get bonus points for knowing (without looking it up) that that’s The Immortals’ Fete?
I’m going to use them to try to keep my family from being homeless.
Food, Rent, and utility bills, most likely. At this point it’s a race between how long the lockdown lasts in Ohio and how long the company operating the casino I work at can pay us, and if I have to find another job my pay most likely gets cut by between 25% and 50%.
What are the odds of getting coronavirus from people who walk by you outdoors? I ask because Chicago’s mayor just told people to stop going out for jogs and bike rides.
My understanding is that coronavirus, like many other diseases, spreads when people are together in confined spaces (crowded buses, elevators), when they have direct physical contact, or when they touch surfaces and objects that infected people have touched or breathed on, and then they put their dirty fingers in their own eyes or mouth.
However, if you’re out for a jog along a road, none of those conditions exist. Even if you passed by an infected person and their exhaled breath contained virus particles, wouldn’t the breath dissipate in the open air, and wouldn’t the odds of you breathing it in while you ran by them be incredibly low?
You’re probably right on the direct effects.
Steelmanning:
1. If the situation is really bad, like NYC bad, you might want to clamp down on those small chances.
2. There are too many people walking around to do something unessential, claiming it’s “for exercise” and they need to get those people off the streets so they can fry bigger fish
Think passing by somebody who is smoking. Can you smell the smoke? Coronavirus spreads at least as far as smoke does.
Approximately as far as smoke, probably slightly less, surely? I’d expect hot bits of ash go further than heavier moisture droplets, but I could of course be wrong.
The moisture evaporates and you have an aerosol.
The dynamics of respiratory droplets is complicated. Generally speaking, larger droplets fall to the ground in a couple seconds, while smaller droplets stay in the air until they evaporate.
Once a droplet has evaporated, the virions will stay suspended in the air as an aerosol, eventually they will dry out and become unviable, but how long this takes depends a lot on the virus (based on things like the surface-to-volume ratio of the average virion and the chemical properties of its surface proteins). E.g. ebola dries out almost immediately, while influenza can last for at least one hour. I guess that Covid-19 is close to influenza in this regard given how contagious it is.
The best data I know of (disclaimer: I’m an amateur) shows that airborne virus stays infectious for at least three hours. But outdoors is very big, and there’s usually some breeze and such, so I expect airborne virus is very quickly being diluted to very low doses, and also that the UV from sunlight significantly shortens the half-life of the virus in tiny suspended particles.
Yes, but we are talking about the scenario of somebody passing by you within 1-2 meters, probably breathing heavily from running. You are going to inhale the air they exhaled within a few seconds, so there isn’t probably much volume and time for sufficient dilution.
If an asymptomatic carrier running past someone at two meters distance had any significant chance of transmitting this coronavirus, COVID-19 would have an R0 closer to twenty than to two. Same goes for e.g. sitting across the table when they are talking.
I am in favor of strict enforcement on this, if only to try and recruit more of blue tribe to team “No, we cannot lock everyone in their houses for six months because of this.”
You’d be surprised at how brainwashed and invested people get into this, once they’re in lockdown.
The things the lockdown is doing to people in Spain are crazy. People stand in balconies screaming at health workers spewing hate because of envy. The level of neighbours reporting each other increases.
It seems like once people are locked, they are invested in the lockdown working, and locking other people up to make it work.
I think there’s a belief that the faster everyone truly locks down, the faster the lockdown will be over. While that’s probably true, it’s probably less true than a lot of people want it to be.
We don’t know how exactly the virus can and cannot spread. The virus is new. When someone gets sick, either they had close contact with another confirmed case, then we assume that’s where they got the infection. Or we don’t know where they got infected. Maybe they remember a coughing jogger running past, or rubbing their eyes in the supermarket, but we don’t know if that’s where they became infected.
So far, there are no cases where we know for sure it was passed over surfaces. We assume it can happen because it happens with other viruses.
We don’t know how contagious the virus is in the air, how far it usually flies, and how long it stays infectious. Maybe you can get it from a passing jogger. Probably not.
But if you’re trying to enforce a curfew in your city, taking away the “I’m jogging” excuse does a lot to help you control people’s movement.
The odds of infection are potentially higher than people think. If people are exercising, they are exhaling vigorously, and the person who runs through that exhaled area is inhaling deeply. People running 10-20 feet apart could be within each other’s exhaled area within seconds. Also, in a city park where there are more than a few joggers, you will have multiple such exposures. But I don’t think we know very well yet how the virus behaves in aerosol form, or how contagious it might be in those cases.
I think quarantine will be problematic in cities, where people are used to social interaction and missing it. So they will use the exceptions for exercise or dog walking to go out to the park, and because there are lots of people in cities, many will end up in the same parks at the same times. Since the purpose of quarantine is to stop the spread of diseases, not test new ways of transmission, cities will crack down on the behavior.
This is why local regulations and enforcement is a good thing. In a less dense town, maybe people go out jogging and don’t end up in the same parks, so they’re not near other joggers, and they don’t need to restrict the activity.
I also agree with the steelman argument #2: if it looks like people are out doing things and it doesn’t look so much like quarantine, then even more people will feel like they can go out for a rule-bending reason. And again, in a denser city, it only takes a small percentage of people out and about to look not-deserted. So the authorities crack down for the appearance of things, which looks bad too.
I’m grateful we live in a world where Cardi B. (whoever she is) gets valuable CNN real estate to state her expert opinion on COVID-19. (Not that she’s wrong, but WTF are people seeking Coronavirus advice from anyone except medical experts?) The developing celebrity/COVID nexus is fascinating, as musicians, movie stars, etc. scramble to find ways to keep themselves in the news.
“But if a celebrity is saying, ‘Hey, listen. I don’t have no symptoms. I’m feeling good. I’m feeling healthy. I don’t feel like nothing, but I went and got tested and I’m positive for the coronavirus,’ that cause confusion,” she said in the expletive-laden video, during which she wears a mask. The video has been viewed more than 15 million times.
Bout time they get the celebrities in on it
I’m loving this. I love to watch them squirm. Celebrities are far more entertaining when suffering.
Was the celebrity name Cardi O already taken?
There is Bacardi, but no Ocardi…
(yes, her name is a play on Bacardi)
“My name Cardi B / I run this shit like cardio” is in fact a Cardi B lyric.
Could there be a whole Cardi alphabet?
So the US government is injecting a couple trillion dollars into an economy that is producing much less in the way of goods and services than it was a few weeks ago. The reduced production seems likely to be caused by outside forces in a way that stimulated demand seems uniquely unlikely to help.
I am not an economist. Am I missing something here or is this the worst possible time for a massive stimulus bill?
I think the point is just to keep the system going and let people pay their rent/buy food for another 2-3 weeks and then we can get back to normal.
Treating it as an economics question is probably starting from the wrong end of the horse.
Yes, from the perspective of numbers-actually-mean-things-and-accurate-measurements-are-important, launching a massive cash drop right as the economy goes into a ditch for reasons that are not “insufficient cash” is pretty dubious.
However, from the political perspective, if you want to get elected any time soon, you desperately want people to see you doing something for them.
And from a psychological perspective, you want to convince people that they’ll be OK, and lots of people are going to go into cash crunches because they’ve had their jobs shut down, so handing out lots of cash alleviates the immediate symptoms.
This is basically a liquidity crisis. A lot of companies will presumably still be viable after the crisis, as long as the government keeps them running in the mean time. Think of it less as “stimulus” and more like “life support”. The stimulus should come after the lockdown is over.
This is not a liquidity crisis at all. A liquidity crisis is when the value of collateral/ability to borrow is the core issue, the core issue for companies here is collapsing revenue. This is a solvency crisis where the amount of debt being held cannot be serviced by the amount of revenue coming in.
Most companies face limited ability to raise external funds as their default state, certainly if they have to do it in a hurry. this is no doubt compounded by current uncertainty — if a company shows up with a tin cup looking to raise funds, a lot of potential investors are going to be very skeptical of their claims to be fundamentally sound.
Companies have bills to pay — rent, payroll. If you shut off their revenue stream for a few weeks (or months) they’re going to face big problems, even if they are sound.
Plus, part of this is to avoid secondary effects. For example, suppose you’re right and (conditional on the shutdown *and existing debt obligations*) a lot of companies are now technically insolvent. This will then result in a lot of people being laid off and missed debt payments. Banks would then be at risk, which could prompt financial contagion. Tons of counterparty risk. Since investors don’t know banks’ exposure, banks could also face trouble raising funds.
Further, bankruptcy is a costly process. Plenty of companies might be sound going forward if they didn’t have to make payments on their debts over the next few months, but won’t make it if they have to. That’s what chapter 11 is for, but restructuring is hard and costly, and imagine what would happen if half the companies in the US have to do it all at once? The result of this course is that tons of organizational capital would be destroyed, and these effects would propagate through the supply chain and financial connections in unpredictable ways.
The point is that a liquidity crisis and a solvency crisis are two different things, a solution to a liquidity crisis is different and the two shouldn’t be conflated.
It’s a relevant distinction to keep in mind, but difficult to separate in practice. I think that the current bill can largely be justified on the grounds of helping to solve a liquidity crisis, even if it’s (technically) a solvency crisis for some (even many) companies, for the reasons I explained above.
Note that this is pretty different from a situation where (e.g.) a lot of banks made investments that turned out to be bad. These investments only turned out to be bad because of a global pandemic! We don’t *want* to burn all that capital! We want to keep things roughly in the same place so everything can start back up again once we’ve whipped the bugs!
The Federal Reserve has gone to extreme lengths to resolve any liquidity issues that aren’t directly solvency issues already. Anything in this bill will be addressing solvency directly.
False, or at best unsupported. There were multiple red flags of a coming crisis before the virus hit, including the Fed initiating massive repo actions back in October. However, even if you grant that then you still don’t want your economy built in such a way that a pandemic will cause a massive solvency crisis because these things DO happen.
The Fed is doing what they can — maybe more. But they can’t do everything, since they can’t make it all that targeted, or do much for certain categories of businesses (or households, obviously). A larger-scale action was necessary, based on the reasoning I laid out in my original comment.
Whether or not the economy could be set up to not take a hit in such a situation (I’m not sure how you could, outside of improving pandemic response), that’s not the system we have, so this action is needed.
Whether or not we would have otherwise had a crisis, I think it’s safe to say that the crisis we’re actually having is due to this bug from China.
This is bad reasoning. You have to assume that both the current system is desirable and that the actions will allow the system to survive. I am challenging the second premise because we have no real reason to believe it using the historical record.
I’m ignoring the reasoning specifically, I am asking for why you believe observation-ally/empirically/anecdotally that a coordinated fiscal and monetary response can achieve a 2-3% inflation rate when all attempts to date have failed. What would count as evidence that such actions could not work in your view?
Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m confused. Your responses seem incoherent to me, which suggests a fairly large failure to communicate.
You originally said:
I said, in effect, sure, that would be nice, but you go into the crisis with the economy you have, not the one you wish you had, and the one we have needs a bailout.
You responded:
So now your contention is what exactly, that the whole system is doomed even *with* a bailout? Is that fair? That seems…well, difficult to support, to put it mildly, and not really related to any of our original disagreements, nor supported by any argument you’ve made, so I don’t really want to go into it. But I suppose if you want to argue for that proposition…well, just go ahead I guess.
To your second comment:
First, my original comment was unrelated to the question of 2-3% inflation. They were about the necessity of the bailout bill. My views on long-term optimal monetary policy and disaster response policy are different.
As to why I think 2-3% inflation is achievable — mostly theoretical reasons, but the theory is well supported empirically (I think). Why have we failed to achieve it? For the reasons I have described: we *haven’t* had fiscal coordination, the Fed has a 2% target, and there are two sources of asymmetry which leave expectations below their target (the zero lower bound, and the view that the Fed views 2% as a ceiling, not an average target.)
Despite the nominal 2% target, I don’t think Fed actions are consistent with an actual 2% target.
Fed actions, ISTM, are more consistent with 2% as a targeted ceiling. IOW, when we look like we are starting to approach 2%, the Fed backs off on the gas pedal.
The Fed can trivially achieve a 2-3% inflation rate if it so chooses. It simply purchases assets until that happens. If it fails to achieve the 2-3% inflation, then the Fed now owns the entire world at zero cost to the taxpayers, which would be phenomenal and far better than a stable monetary policy- after all money is neutral in the long term. But it should be obvious that would not be the result.
Just to clarify one point: the Fed explicitly *does not* have a 2% inflation target, because it legally can’t target inflation; it legally has a dual mandate (“price stability” and “full employment”).
But, you know, they let it be known that they sure would like inflation to be around 2%, which they view as consistent with their dual mandate.
According to conventional Keynesian principles, this is the best possible time for a massive stimulus bill. When demand is reduced, you inflate demand. A better way of implementing it would be for the state to directly employ people who have lost their jobs, but we’re trying to keep people from working if they don’t have to.
This also helps people pay their rent, utilities and grocery bills, which is also kinda important.
Is demand reduced?
It would seem to me that supply is reduced.
People didn’t decide, on their own, to stop going to the bar as much. The government went around and closed all the bars down.
Demand was still reduced, the way demand is reduced but still exists when the government bans meth.
Sure.
But no meth dealer would ever tell you that his core business problem is “insufficient demand.”
OTOH, a big stimulus check for people locked in their homes will probably stimulate demand for the meth dealers, too. A rising tide lifts all boats!
When our employers sent us home and our kids’ schools sent them home, our family decided, on our own, to stop going to restaurants and bars. We let the youngest daughter get an slush or whatever at Sonic on day 2 of ‘no school’ and since then, nothing for any of us. We’ve been eating and drinking whatever we can get at home. Lots of home-made food, and I’ve lost about 5 lbs by avoiding fast food. It may be that the government makes this official pretty soon in Alabama, but for now the restaurants are open for drive-through, and my boss told me the rules are relaxed here such that we can get a pitcher of margaritas (or whatever) drive-through style at local restaurant/bars (as opposed to pure bars, which I don’t know about).
I think lots of people did similarly. Certainly many of my friends have done so.
This is what worries me though. It’s easy to notice that restaurants and bars are in trouble because they lost their customers. It’s less immediately obvious that almost every other industry worldwide is in trouble because they’ve either stopped producing altogether or are producing much less efficiently than usual because their employees are trying to work remotely. This despite their customers willing to spend exactly as much as before.
Yes, demand is reduced.
Even in the absence of a closure, you will still see reduced demand. There are lots of people making the decision not to do X because of the fear of Covid-19 exposure. That has ripple effects down the chain, lowering supply as well.
Put another way, no one is saying that a restaurant can’t cook food, they are just saying that no one can come in and eat food. That’s an enforced demand problem, not a supply problem. But even in the absence of enforced closures, you were going to see people choosing not to go out to eat for fear of exposure.
But, it’s chicken-egg. Your demand is my supply. The NBA decided all on it’s that they a) didn’t wish to supply games to customers, and also b) didn’t have demand for all sorts of services.
Take-out food and “seated meal in a restaurant” are not identical goods.
The supply of seated meals has been slashed, significantly, via government action.
Would demand have gone down anyway due to diligent/aware people choosing to limit their own exposure to the virus? Sure. But not like this. And we know that to be true because if it wasn’t true, no government order to shut down the restaurants would have been necessary. They’d have already been shuttered for lack of business.
Again, the NBA, the NCAA, LiveNation, etc. all shuttered themselves. Yes, that reduced the supply of some things, but it ALSO reduced demand for other things.
The auto shop my kid works at has a drastically reduced number of customers. Why? For a whole host of interconnected reasons. But it isn’t because the government is preventing people from coming to the parts store.
There were going to be huge economic disruptions regardless, because of the underlying fact of a spreading pandemic. The pandemic is the underlying issue driving all of this.
I know a lot have already replied, but I want to chime in saying that demand is indeed severely reduced in many areas.
Two examples.
1) New car sales have plummeted. This might be only because car dealerships have closed, but I imagine since a new car is a “luxury” good, most people are putting off buying a car.
2) My brother-in-law is in home remodeling and since this virus hit all of his future jobs have basically evaporated. He has current work, but once that is done there appears to be very little work afterwards. People are putting off home remodels for the time being.
Yeah, there’s various things I’ve been wanting to buy, like a sound system for my game room, but it just feels weird to go shopping (online, obv) for stuff like that during a pandemic. Like I’m asking the packing workers and delivery drivers to expose themselves to deadly illnesses so I can have more toys.
The packing workers and delivery drivers are already going full out, and hopefully taking reasonable precautions and getting paid extra.
I don’t think anyone is disputing that demand for luxury goods drops during an economic depression (or even during times of economic uncertainty where depression seems likely).
But it doesn’t drop to zero. Here’s a table showing BMW sales per year from Wikipedia.
2007 1,276,793
2008 1,202,239
2009 1,068,770
2010 1,224,280
So in 2009 (the worst of the last recession), sales were about 17% off their 2007 former peak. That’s what a recession gets you: 10-20% less demand.
To the extent that BMW sales are now zero, it seems fair to estimate that 80-90% of that effect is due to reduced supply.
Not being able to drive your BMW makes buying it kinda pointless.
Even if I had the cash and desire to buy a luxury car, I would wait until I was allowed to drive it around. There’s a reason why football players who buy fancy cars before they get a driving license are derided as not very smart. And those people are the exception.
Car inventories are such that a drop in supply wouldn’t be initially noticeable. I have driven by the car dealerships in my town and they are as full as ever. We obviously don’t have the data yet, but “experts” predict that car sales will drop due to Coronavirus.
Regarding “luxury/unnecessary” goods. The thing is most spending in the US can be considered luxury/unnecessary. These include things such as almost all repairs, medical procedures/visits, upgrading items, any food except staples, clothing, beauty products, entertainment, etc etc etc. The list goes on and on. And yes, a lot of this is because the places are closed. But a lot of it isn’t because of that. And it remains to be seen whether demand will surge past normal to make-up for the lost demand during this period.
Why? If you buy it, you will presumably own it and drive it for a decade or so. Even if you assume current restrictions will last for six months, which seems unlikely, that only costs you about five percent of the car’s value. I would think that, under current circumstances, you could get such a car for at least that much less than usual.
And note that in the US, you can still drive around. I’m not aware of any accounts, even anecdotally, of people being pulled over in their cars and questioned as to why they are out and what their destination is (yet).
What you can’t do is buy a car, because the dealerships have been closed by government decree.
Most people who buy luxury cars don’t seem to drive them for a decade.
Driving a ten-year old Mercedes is low status. The newer the car, the more status. And people need to see you have a fancy car. What’s the point of driving it around if people can’t see your fancy car, you can’t show it to chicks/the Joneses/your colleagues?
People who want a car that gets them from point A to point B don’t buy luxury cars. That’s not the point of a luxury car.
No it is not. Convetional Keynesian principles state that stimulus works by filling in the ‘output gap’ where the economy has a productive capacity of X, but demand falls to why, and the government can step in and fill the void between X and Y. Currently capacity to produce is down, X is now X-Z and stimulus can not fill that.
When it’s over seems to me the time for a stimulus bill. The things people can spend money on right now seem likely to be poor choices for making the money circulate fast in their own country. (I’m not an economist, but isn’t that what you want a stimulus to do – have people take holidays or eat in restaurants, then the folks who entertain them spend in turn? You don’t want them to buy a new gaming computer that was made abroad.)
I think we want people who can’t work because the government ordered their business closed to be able to pay their rent and buy groceries.
If we were actually Keynesians we would have been running anti-stimulus measures over the past 6 or so years to save up for a crisis like now.
Yes.
This crisis highlights yet another reason why the response to the 2008 crisis should have been austerity. The Fed hadn’t managed to unwind its balance sheet and had barely brought interest rates up to the pre 2008 lows before having to start cutting again. Italy’s debt to GDP in 2019 was 40% higher than it was going into the 2008 crisis, and they have no ability to borrow on the open market without ECB support right now.
Huh? Your conclusions don’t follow from your statements at all.
According to Keynesian theory, the proper response to 2009 *was* massive stimulus. The real problem was 2017, not 2009, when people started throwing fuel on the fire and running record deficits during a booming economy.
No, because even according to Keynesian theory the lack of debt relief in 2017 makes the decision to stimulate incorrect in 2009.
The calculus for stimulus requires that the debt incurred during the stimulus does not weigh on growth after the fact. It doesn’t matter if you want to blame politicians in 2017 (and conveniently ignore the fact that countries who tried to unwind their stimulus measures were immediately threatened with recession, ala Japan’s tax increases or the Fed’s attempt to unwind its balance sheet), being unable to unwind the debt makes the theory bunk on its own. It doesn’t matter WHY you couldn’t unwind the debt.
This sounds a whole lot like fighting the last war. Sure demand is reduced but it seems at least plausible that supply is reduced more. Factories and businesses are closing. Fewer things are being produced, not due to a lack of demand for them but because a virus has shut down the factories that produce them.
Maybe demand is falling more than supply, but if it’s not then this is putting the government’s thumb on exactly the wrong side of the scale.
Money doesn’t help people buy groceries if there are fewer groceries being produced. It just makes them more expensive.
You mean because the government has shut down the factories that produce them.
“Price gouging” laws stop that from happening. Toilet paper hasn’t gotten any more expensive. It’s just damn near impossible to find. This will lead to shortages and black markets, but official businesses will be prohibited from raising prices significantly to reflect the new demand conditions.
To what extent are fewer groceries being produced though? I’m sure the effect is not zero, but I doubt it’s significant enough to cause noticeable inflation.
Ironically, some things at my local grocery store are cheaper than they’ve ever been now, though I’m not sure why.
There are a lot of specialty producers who provide things like fresh salad greens to restaurants. These guys have seen demand collapse and have been fighting to sell what they can to whoever is buying, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was one of the issues.
Groceries were just the example at hand, but the economy is way too interconnected for this kind of isolation. If fewer tractor parts are being produced (or even if farmers think they will be) then the price of groceries goes up.
In my own workplace the precursor chemical to PVC is almost certainly being produced less efficiently with all non-essential personnel working remotely. Same goes for the other plastics plants in the area. So any product that relies on any part of a supply chain using plastics is going to get slightly more expensive.
Like you said it’s a small effect, but it’s across almost every industry worldwide and it’s all pointing in the same direction. An economic stimulus, even under Keynesian principles, is pushing farther in that same direction.
In a month there will be significantly less “demand” for housing and workspace as people and businesses default on their rents and mortgages, and less “demand” for employees as businesses lose their income streams. You can view this as a preemptive stimulus toward this expected “demand” fall.
In the 2008/2009 crisis the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates from 4.75% to 0.25% over the course of 15 months (destroying saver’s expected income streams), when if they had acted a few months prior they might have avoided such a massive reduction and still netted far better outcomes than expected.
The federal reserve had far less room to maneuver this time, so it was imperative they (and Congress) act in a preemptive manner.
Jim Cramer’s lesson has been learned (he called it a full 2 months before the Fed dropped rates from 4.75% to 4.5%).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOVXh4xM-Ww
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGwgKqTKMFQ
They did act a few months prior. The Fed’s first rate cut came in August of 2007, and the they had cut (the federal funds rate) from 5.25 down to 2.00 by May 2008 and these cuts occurred with an emergency federal stimulus spending bill of >$100 billion that was signed in Feb of 2008. There is zero historical evidence that the Fed can ‘get ahead of the curve’ with rate cuts. They were cutting prior to the start of the 2007/08 recession and cutting aggressively ahead of the crises period in late 2008, they were cutting ahead of the 2000 recession having gone from 6.25% to 5.25% in the 5 months before the officials start of that recession, and of the last 3 recessions in the US the mildest one was the one in which the Fed didn’t cut rates until 4-5 months into the recession.
According to the charts I’m reading they cut it by 50 basis points (10%) in September of 2007, not in August. After having raised it 350 basis points (200%) in the preceding three years of interest-only and teaser-rate mortgages (425 basis points – 425% in the preceding 3 years and 3 months).
http://www.fedprimerate.com/fedfundsrate/federal_funds_rate_history.htm
June 25, 2003 1.00
June 30, 2004 1.25
August 10, 2004 1.50
September 21, 2004 1.75
…
June 29, 2006 5.25
September 18, 2007 4.75
Yes, because they weren’t paying attention. They were behind the curve by about three years. https://www.thebalance.com/fed-funds-rate-history-highs-lows-3306135
Apples and oranges. Recessions can’t be directly compared. Back in 2008/9 we had a recession driven by bad mortgages causing people to lose homes they should never have bought in the first place. This time we have job losses threatening the loss of homes people should have bought (or rented) in the first place. The dotcom recession had comparatively negligible impact on the affordability of homes.
The effective federal funds rate fell by 0.25 basis points in August, this is a better reflection of Fed policy than the precise dates of meetings and announcements, however if you want to follow the latter that doesn’t change the point much.
That position is fairly pointless to hold, there is no way that the Fed was going to cut rates in 2005 or 2004, there was no data to indicate that they should be loosening policy, and such a belief pretty much confirms that the Fed cannot get ahead of the curve.
That doesn’t matter, you should still be able to cite instances of the Fed getting ahead of the curve and preventing a recession, or of recessions in which the Fed is easing before hand that are milder than those where they weren’t.
OR SOMETHING resembling evidence/correlation/theory that would match with some part of reality.
I’m citing Jim Cramer, who cited people he was talking with who managed trading desks and companies.
Of course he wasn’t just talking about the prime Fed rate.
Contrary to what some people above are saying, what is happening is simultaneous fall in aggregate supply and aggregate demand. Unlike in 2008, when it was overwhelmingly aggregate demand that fell.
Restaurants are closed because of supply restrictions, but supply of housing remains unchanged. Demand for housing, however, is going to fall as waitresses are going to default on their rent payments.
While supply is restricted for a reasons that will not be ameliorated by any stimulus, it is not desirable to let demand fall. We need a rapid reallocation of demand from some sectors (restaurants, cinemas) to others – healthcare, delivery services, IT infrastructure. Stimulus should help with that.
This doesn’t matter in a Keynesian framework, the ‘fall’ for the demand in housing doesn’t actually cause the amount of housing to fall. Keynesian logic is that the fall in demand causes a decrease in supply, which causes the job loss of those who produce that supply, which causes those workers to reduce their demand, etc, etc. The stimulus here is not going to increase demand for new houses, only shifting demand across existing housing, which means it is not fulfilling the type of demand that is needed for Keynesian stimulus to work.
This is wrong. It is not going to increase demand for new houses compared to a baseline of “no crisis” but it is going to increase demand compared to a baseline of “a crisis with no stimulus”.
Yes? And who is going to build those new houses? What planning commissions are going to hold public meetings right now to get approvals? Who is buying new construction when the stock market is down 25% in a month? Who is loaning money for new construction in this environment? Who is moving cities (population flows are a major driver of new construction) when they aren’t leaving their own homes?
Major purchases are slashed during a crisis, yes I am sure there would be some technical, and marginal, demand but Keynesians are not so stupid (despite being generally ill informed) that they propose that ANY increase in demand is worth any amount of spending.
Halted approval process and construction are supply side issues. It does not mean that demand for new houses has dropped to zero. It dropped massively, but without stimulus it would drop further than with stimulus.
At any rate, demand for new houses is at this point almost irelevant. What is important is demand for existing housing stock. To what extent households are going to default en masse on their rents and mortgages will be at least partially determined by the stimulus.
The demand drop is not for “new houses”, but for “already existing houses”.
If (loans were) money was suddenly unavailable for used vehicles you see a huge drop in demand for them. Just as you’ll see a huge drop in demand for “used” housing.
For used vehicles this would cause price decreases until people could afford to buy them from savings (or scrapyards started buying them for salvage).
Unlike with used vehicles, the price of “used” housing can only drop so far as the current owners owe mortgages and taxes on them.
I’m not a market fundamentalist, but doesn’t the market reaction give you some pause? 1-year treasury is down to 0.25%. The 5-year breakeven inflation rate fell to 0.16% a few days ago, and now (on hope of the bill) is up to 0.69%. Fed’s target is ~2%, so that suggests we’re well short of where the Fed wants us to be…and that’s over 5 years, so if we take 2% as our target, that means a cumulative deficit of ~7%.
And I’m of the view that the cost of (say) 3% inflation isn’t that great, and might even be a good idea relative to 2%.
This really begs the question: If the fed can’t hit a 2% inflation target what makes you think they can hit 3%? Why would inflation stabilizes at 3%?
I’m pretty sure that they can hit 2% or 3% fairly well, at least over longer time horizons, with proper monetary and fiscal coordination. Lacking the latter, they might have some trouble, true. I do think they raised rates too quickly after the recovery was underway. But there are limits to what monetary policy can achieve by itself.
Given what? You just said
We have just gone through the largest expansion of Fed action and promises in history, if that doesn’t do it then why are you confident that something can be done?
The Fed has never hit its inflation target of 2% over a long period, what has happened after every crisis for the past 40 years is lower inflation than the previous crisis. The 2010-2020 period had a lower rate than the 2001-2008, which was lower than the 90s, which was lower than the 80s which was lower than the 70s. The fed has explicitly trying to increase inflation and has been falling short of their desired outcomes over the past decade. What would it take to change your mind, what actual real world example could possible convince you that the Fed can not control inflation?
I said *conditional on fiscal coordination*, which they haven’t had. And then explained why they haven’t been able to consistently hit 2% even recently.
I’m starting to think you’re not reading what I’m writing, or maybe I’m not doing a good job explaining.
Actually, I realize I explained that in the comment immediately below this one, so maybe you just didn’t see it when you replied.
The 5-year breakeven was ~2% for most of 2018, so it seems they were doing pretty well then.
Part of the problem is that the market views 2% as a ceiling, not an average target. This means that it expects average inflation to be *below* 2% over long time periods.
there’s also a built in asymmetry from the zero lower bound. But even apart from that, Fed behavior and messaging suggests an asymmetry.
Plus I think there was a strong bias in the Fed towards “normalization”. People just don’t handle strange situations well, and big organizations even less so.
So the Fed can hit its target over a long time period = the fed was pretty close that one year of the last 10 and then a year later had to engage in rate cuts and emergency repo operations that rivaled their actions during the GFC in nominal terms?
This implies that the market controls the inflation rate, not the Fed, which provides evidence against and not for this view.
I partly explained above. I think that monetary and fiscal policy *could* jointly hit 2% (or 3%) inflation target if they so chose, but I agree they have failed to hit 2%, for the reasons I have mentioned.
The inflation rate, like any economic variable, is an endogenous result of a system with many participants. Policymakers (including the Fed) are quite significant participants — they have at their disposal policy levers that can have large effects. By moving these levers, they can cause economic variables to change.
I am curious, is here anyone who thinks that fiscal austerity was an appropriate response to 2008 financial crisis, but is not a proper response to a current crisis? If so, what are the arguments for that?
I wouldn’t go so hard as to say that I think that fiscal austerity was the right choice in 2008, but I think the case for it was much stronger then than now.
2008 was a financial crisis through and through. The contraction was at least arguably a necessary market corrections to fundamentally mispriced assets. Letting the market play it out was to some degree necessary.
This is a pandemic crisis. If we could have a magic wand and have the entire economy go into time stop and then just restart at the other side of covid-19, there is no reason why the post covid-19 economy would look different than the pre-covid-19 one. So the government trying to be something closer to that magic wand is more justified here.
This is a pandemic colliding with a financial crisis.
Any crisis tends to expose part of the pretend economy, which seems to inevitably develop during the good times. The best would be to deflate the pretend economy while maintaining all of the real economy, but no one has figured out how to do that.
Its not that, the Federal Reserve had to step in to the Repo market in October with a major intervention and they cut rates 3 times prior to Corona causing any havoc.
Why should a necessary market correction be accompanied by a long lasting rise in unemployment?
A necessary market correction should be accompanied by a short-term spike in unemployment, as inefficient firms fail and it takes time for more efficient firms to offer jobs to their ex-employees. Saying “we will not allow a short-term spike in unemployment! We will therefore bail out the inefficient firms rather than see their employees thrown out of work!”, results in a long-lasting rise in unemployment as the inefficient firms keep struggling to keep their people fully employed and more efficient firms have difficulty breaking into markets occupied by the won’t-be-allowed-to-fail inefficient firms.
Eventually, the inefficient firms will be outcompeted and fail in spite of the bailouts (or wise up and become efficient), but that can take a decade or more. If you want the long-term unemployment to end faster than that, then you need the spike in short-term unemployment.
That it entirely correct and also the reason why I specifically referred to “a long lasting rise in unemployment”.
Hasn’t this been the case in every historical episode? Or do you have a different definition of “long-lasting” than I do?
There are two reasons why I doubt that.
First, perhaps only those necessary market corrections that result in prolonged rise in unemployment are remembered in historical memory, while others are forgotten. For example, there was a giant market crash on Wall Street in 1987, which did not result in a recession. Although in fairness I am not sure whether it could be characterized as a necessary market correction or not, I honestly don’t know enough about US economic history to have an informed opinion.
Second, post 2008 unemployment spike was worst in a postwar history of both US and Western Europe. So even if we grant that elevated long-lasting unemployment is an inevitable outcome of sufficiently huge market correction, it is difficult to accept that it had to be that bad.
Specifically, there were a lot of big players that behaved irresponsibly and lost a lot of money in the financial crisis, and the ones that got bailout money (to keep the whole system standing) were protected from the consequences of their irresponsible behavior, but still got to keep the proceeds of that behavior from the years when the bets worked out for them. This created bad incentives.
I think the risk of bad incentives here are smaller, at least w.r.t. consumer bailouts to cover people losing their jobs thanks to coronavirus shutdowns. The mask companies and the FDA probably made some bad decisions somewhere along the line, but the out-of-work bartenders and waiters and such had nothing to do with causing this crisis.
The out of work bartenders do have a lot to do with why they don’t have any savings and why the richest country in the history of the world can’t handle a few weeks of lock-down without threats of pandemonium. The moral hazard here is the same as for the banks, in 2008 the government expanded its welfare programs so that people didn’t have to default on their to big and to expensive homes, and doubled the length of time you could receive UE payments. Now we have an even larger crisis, and here we are again, 3x/4x/5x the bribes so people don’t have to do the obvious.
Not quite. While banks fail all the time, the large banks tend to fail only when the entire banking sector is taking a hit. Thus thanks to the 2008 bailout they know they can take risks as long as most of the other large banks are taking the same risks and have a good chance of being bailed out.
This is not the case with the hoi polloi, as the hoi polloi face liquidity risks all the time when the larger economy is not facing a liquidity risk. Bailing out the hoi polloi at a time when many of them are taking a hit gives zero assurances that they will be bailed out at other times. Twice in the last 90-odd years have the hoi polloi been bailed out (federal works programs during the Great depression, and now). This isn’t frequent enough to generate a moral hazard.
Not really. I guess that is the lesson if you are blind, but Citigroup went from a $300 billion market cap to under $10 billion during the crisis. They got a bail out to prevent outright bankruptcy, but they were far from being made whole, this is a rough analogy for what happened to the masses during the crisis. People lost money but aggressive measures were taken to prevent masses of bankruptcies simultaneously.
What happened to their infrastructure and employment numbers? Market cap (the equivalent of the fair-market price of your house) is of far less importance than these (the equivalent of still owning your home, despite being underwater on the mortgage).
Rwanda has come up with a new and harsh penalty for violating coronavirus lockdown:
https://www.9news.com.au/world/coronavirus-rwanda-man-killed-eaten-by-crocodile-after-defying-covid19-lockdown-measures/5c73feec-cfbe-4033-a8df-acda61b88027?ocid=Social-9News
Well, at least we know how Florida is going to enforce their lockdown. Well that and Florida Man.
Florida Man is self-enforcement.
Given the shortage of American Crocodiles, we may have to substitute Alligators in some cases.
I was laying out bait hoping somebody would AKSHUALLY me about Florida alligators, not crocs, so I could hit them with he American Crocodile.
You expect me to be mistaken about Southern wildlife?! You fool!
🙂
Perhaps the governor can get extra crocodiles from the national stockpile?
Nah, they’re all used up now, and croc manufacturing has moved overseas, so there’ll be some trouble replenishing the stockpile in these times.
“It is with a heavy heart that I must report a Rwandan man was devoured in crocodile jaws for flouting the law.”
So a couple of friends and I are writing a piece of software (python) to make a wordcloud out of the headlines for the NYTs then stitch those wordclouds into a gif that will show how the frequency of words will grow or shrink over time. I don’t forsee any technical reasons why this wouldn’t be a reasonably short and straightforward project, but I’m wondering if anyone can think of any interesting directions this project could go?
To be clear, I’m not looking to monetize it, this is just an open source project i thought would be interesting to build.
You have a constraint not normally required when creating a wordcloud: the words should stay fairly close to the spot they held the previous day, otherwise you’ll just get a gif full of blurs jumping around.
This can be challenging, especially if you also strive to keep the word-cloud tight and with few empty spaces.
Agreed. Making a tight wordcloud is a kind of packing/layout problem, so I’m guessing it’s hard in the worst case, but mitigated in practice by not requiring strictly optimal solutions. Adding a temporal dimension is going to increase the difficulty a lot, and I would guess that you’ll spend a lot of time tweaking your algorithm. It’ll work beautifully on one input but then break down horribly on the next.
But then again, these things are hard to predict. So don’t be discouraged. Good luck, and please report back to us 🙂
I think thats going to be the bigest problem.. by far. I was really hoping to be able to use a wordcloud api, but I don’t think its going to work. My team isn’t that experienced, so Im already trying to find ways to simplify this. And avoid having anyone get too discouraged.
I could switch to a barchart that does the same thing, but it won’t look as neat…
I could also try putting in transition frames whith a few frames of image 1, then a few frames where trandsparency of image one is increased, and image 2 is decreased, then a few frames of image 2. It would create a smoother transition, but still won’t really be perfect.
Any other ideas? This is intended to be a learning experience, so I would kinda rather not cheese it if I can
Does anyone have any other ideas to make this m
Ok, here’s a simple idea that can at least get you somewhere.
First, do a static wordcloud with the maximum size for each word. This will produce a non-overlapping solution that’s too spread out (too conservative). But it will animate without overlaps.
Now, observe that for each pair of words, you can relatively easily compute the minimum distance they need to be from each other, so that they never overlap during the animation, even if the maximum bounding boxes overlap. Note that using this second, tighter distance to do a wordcloud is not possible, since the word sizes are no longer universal, but depend on the neighbors of the word.
But what you can do is the following: take your spread out solution, iteratively pick random neighbors and move them closer together as long as the tighter minimum distance allows for it. This shouldn’t be too expensive, since words are going to have relatively few neighbors on average (a word can only have many neighbors if its big and surrounded by small words, so there are few of them. Average # of neighbors should be roughly constant). This is not an optimal algorithm by a long shot (it’s not even fully specified!), but it should be relatively easy to code up something that automatically fixes the most egregious errors and gives reasonable results.
Note that this idea still doesn’t take into account that an optimal solution might have words with moving centers as they change size. I also have a hunch that if words were guaranteed to just grow or shrink linearly (as opposed to having an arbitrary function to describe the size over time), an easier/better algorithm for this problem might actually exist.
FWIW I worked a bit on exactly this a problem a few years ago. I don’t have the code or anything any more but the main approach was like this:
The standard layout algorithm goes from largest word to smallest and starts each one off in a random position near the center, and spirals outwards until it finds an empty space. Holding the parameters of the spiral constant, the final cloud layout is a deterministic function of all the starting values. What you want is a series of clouds where word sizes are slightly different each time and their relative positions change as little as possible.
I had some success using the same basic starting position for a particular word in each frame, but with a small random value added on for each step. I.e. first frame just start at X0 for a given word, next frame X0+X1, after that X0+X1+X2 and so on. Have the X1 through XN values change through random mutation (i.e. a genetic algorithm) and select genomes by minimizing a total cost function for the whole resulting cloud series. I chose a quasi-physical cost function, as in, for frame k, I calculated the hypothetical “force” required to change direction from the k-1 to k movement to the k to k+1 movement for each word. Total cost was all forces required for all words for all frames.
Upside: each cloud looks good, without ugly holes in it. Downside: time consuming and words will unavoidably flit around quite a bit.
I had some encouraging results on some simple test data but never had time to develop it further. Maybe somebody with better understanding of neural nets and such could make something more efficient and less time consuming that my “blind idiot God” approach. One thing that helps a little is making fewer “keyframes” and then interpolate enough frames for an animation, but it means words will often slide a bit on top of each other, and it’s still quite a lot of expensive operations.
Anyway, just FYI, in case it helps.
I guess you could start by doing some kind of curve smoothing, to get less jumpiness in the word levels. Maybe something low-pass filterish.
Then grab a wordcloud out of every nth day to use as a keyframe. Assign the words different z-indexes (how in front/behind they are). Then create animations that moves the words between each keyframe.
They will still jump around, but do so in smooth movements.
Not sure if this is the graphic effect you are looking for, maybe this can be used in conjunction with other ideas as a polish.
This seems to be a quite hard problem, so I’d start by thinking about what you actually need/want, and then think of various ways to get it. Or just challenge yourself I guess 😀
Seems like a fine idea! As others have mentioned, smoothly handling the “time axis” is going to be the tricky part. You are probably already familiar with it, but GapMinder’s Bubbles (https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles) might be an interface to use as a starting point. It’s basically an X-Y chart with “bubbles” of different sizes, and a slider at the bottom to control the time, but it’s very nicely done.
Quick googling reveals “Word Swarms”:
https://github.com/thisIsMikeKane/WordSwarm
Make it a physics simulation: each word fits inside a circle with size proportional to its frequency, and a ‘mass’ as if they were a sphere with that diameter. The circles exhibit a force like gravity on each other, which works to keep the biggest circles centered, even as the size changes over time.
There will be sudden jerky global re-arrangements from many small changes, I guess.
To continue the discussion on mandatory vaccines from the last thread. A rushed and dangerous vaccine for Covid is what Taleb calls an existential risk: something that will affect a (super?)majority of the population at the same time, and there’s no takeback. All countries will pursue aggressive vaccination campaigns once it comes to market, they really have no choice. Poorer countries even more than rich ones, as they really have no alternatives – treating is orders of magnitude more expensive.
This is probably a first for any vaccine – no, for any drug in the history of mankind.
Interesting observation. It puts the US FDA in a very bad position, too; they’re in large measure responsible for however bad things get here due to bureaucratic overreach and insane perfectionism, but this really is the kind of thing they really should be stopping us from doing without adequate testing.
The FDA is able to stop tests; they won’t stop a vaccine, because they’ll get told off by executive order.
If I were doing it, I would only give a barely-tested vaccine to known high-risk groups (over 70, maybe over 60, people with lung conditions). For the older groups in particular, very long term negative effects are thus minimized, as are any reproductive or inheritable negative effects.
Well, old bureaucracies aren’t really famous for seeing the bigger picture.
I’m not knowledgeable on the subject, but from far away FDA seems quite a bit worse than average. Some kind of equivalent agency is obviously necessary, but that particular agency seems to be 1. overreaching 2. too disconnected from (statistica? evidence based? common sense?) reality. Not a good combo.
Do you want Reavers? Because this is how you get Reavers.
I doubt this will be an attenuated live virus vaccine. As long as known allergic peptide sequences are avoided, and previously tested adjuvants are used, this will probably be no worse than a typical killed flu vaccine.
Attenuated and killed virus vaccines would probably be the safest in terms of unknown effects; they’re unlikely to do more damage than the virus itself. But what’s being tested are “particle” and mRNA vaccines, which have less history.
Won’t they just do a subunit vaccines? Make copies of the spike protein and package them with adjuvants? If you’re making antibodies that bind to the spike protein (in its conformation sticking out of the virus particle), you’re probably preventing the virus infecting any cells and marking it for destruction by the innate immune system.
Taleb makes a very nice argument that you should judge existential risks not through the chance something bad will happen (which we are historically very bad at estimating), but by how wide the effects will be. He applied this argument to GMOs and to my utter surprise managed to convince me they’re not the bright idea I thought they were. All the advantages are real, all the commonly mentioned disadvantages are bunk, but still – the long term transformation of 90% of our food sources into a handful of genetically identical monocultures is risky as hell.
To counter that specific example: If you have a problem with the transformation of 90% of our food sources into a handful of genetically identical monocultures, you don’t have a problem with gene guns. You have a problem with the entire institution of human agriculture. We’ve been selectively breeding and cloning crops for millenia.
Some growth pains hurt bad – as europeans learned during the great plague, or Americans when they got colonized, or as we do now. Having a thoroughly globalized world + wild animal meat markets…
So yeah, just because we’ve been moving in this direction for 10k years isn’t a guarantee nothing will go wrong. Au contraire, agriculture’s unique trait was higher caloric content, but also bigger crashes on bad years.
Anyways, the risk is higher with GMOs anyways. We’re far from genetic identity now, with few exceptions. For example bananas 🙂 And they’re constantly under the sword of Damocles.
GMOs aren’t genetically identical. They are an inbred monoculture, and that’s a danger, but the farmers buying GMO corn from Monsanto were buying just as inbred corn from Monsanto before GMO corn was a choice.
The current pandemic is affecting every business in the country. But not every business is affected the same way. Now is a very good time to be in the hand sanitizer business, but a terrible time to be in the movie theatre or airline business. Even with the various bailouts packages, some businesses are likely to fail.
Any thoughts on what businesses won’t be bouncing back after the pandemic lockdowns?
I’m thinking movie theatres, already facing stiff competition from at-home streaming services, may not bounce back. The content producers are getting an unexpected demonstration right now of what the world would be like without the theatres. And it may turn out they’re just not needed.
I think tourism will suffer until this pandemic is efficiently suppressed worldwide. No-one wants to be on a cruise ship or in Cambodia when he gets corona. So airlines may suffer a bit too, or at least focus more on shorter flights.
It’s possible that all kinds of “going out” venues will suffer as people find more ways to spend pleasant time at home, but it’s also possible I’m underestimating the attractiveness of going out.
I don’t think cinemas will necessarily go under, they just have to find more of a niche that isn’t just “see a movie”. They could specialize for some specific type of movie (although all of these might be taken over by specialized online streaming eventually), or just somehow add more of an “event character” to their screenings. I feel like people already go for the cinema experience of eating nachos and listening to the loud sound system as much as they go to view a specific movie.
I think the cruise companies in particular are unlikely to recover. It’s one thing to be stranded in a foreign country; quite another to be trapped on a boat with a spreading virus.
Cruise ships are probably going to become immensely less appealing.
I wonder if the cruise ship companies will try to respond with some kind of major sanitation upgrade: HEPA filters running constantly in every room and indoor public space, all high-touch surfaces coated in copper, buffets replaced by lines where you’re served by someone behind a glass shield, negative-pressure quarantine ward for anyone sick, etc.
OTOH, live music performance bounced back after everyone predicted it would be killed off by streaming. There are social and ritual and status aspects to these things beyond hthe bare product.
I’m pessimistic about stores selling non-perishables, though, as people get even more into the habit of online shopping. The hospitality sector is permanently over supplied, so some of that won’t recover.
High-street travel agents are going to be dead as the dodo. Between the structural changes to the market caused by online booking and a couple of nasty external shocks, they were already hanging on by a thread. None of them will have the cash reserves to keep a storefront open for the year or two it’ll take global travel to normalise.
Not sure if this is true everywhere, but it certainly seems that in the US, movie theaters have been trending in the “fancy recliner with food and more space” direction for a few years now anyway. I think this might exacerbate that trend.
But honestly, at the fancy theater we go to, I probably have more “personal space” than I do in my open-office at work… I’m hoping that’s a trend that will die, but not holding my breath…
This might be the bullet that finally puts Gamestop out of its misery.
Did Gamestop ever have a good reputation? Or were they always at best a necessary evil?
I don’t think so. I always considered them “game store of last resort.” They didn’t have the selection, they didn’t have the stock, they didn’t have good prices, their used game prices and buyback prices were worse than buying or selling on eBay. Their upselling techniques were scammy and uncomfortable. I have no idea why anyone shopped there.
With one exception: they would open at midnight for major releases. So the one time a year there’s a game coming out you care enough to buy at midnight, you could go wait in line at GameStop. Beyond that I would avoid them like the plague.
Like the plague, you say?
Don’t see too many people rushing headlong into plagues…
Professional sports is probably at the top of my list.
It’s basically one of the only things out there whose business model is contingent upon hosting regular gatherings of over 10,000 people. Live attendance was already falling, nearly across the board. Huge rows of empty seats were already easy to spot in almost all sports leagues for almost all but the very best/elite teams.
And then, even if you think they can just adjust/adapt their business model to focus more on fans watching on TV at home, I wonder what an extended absence will do. “Sports fans” are highly ritualistic people who get into the hobby/groove of watching sports. And talking about them and consuming sports-related content when the sports themselves aren’t on. A several month period of “no new sports content at all” and I wonder just how many people will say to themselves “Hey, I’m getting along fine without this, I don’t need to go back to it when it comes back.” The timing specifically of this works out about as well as it could for American Football, so maybe they’ll be fine, but I wonder about basically everyone else…
Hasn’t the pro sports business been all about the TV money for a while now?
Also, any signs the sports that can be done while respecting social distance (tennis, golf) are gaining ground?
My (limited) understanding is that while the TV money is quite important, the ticket revenue/concessions/etc. is still huge. Such that many teams will either have a net profit or net loss on the year based on whether or not they make the playoffs (because making the playoffs gives you X additional home games that will sell-out and make you a lot of money, while everyone basically shares the big TV money)
No, all of those are cancelled as well. Perhaps because it’s just not economically viable to have them without crowds, perhaps because of concern for the athletes themselves.
Such that many teams will either have a net profit or net loss
You’re right that the playoffs are a huge revenue driver, but I don’t believe there are more than a handful of teams in Big 4 professional sports that are losing money.
There does appear to be a revenue bubble that will pop whenever it becomes possible for people to pay for cable without paying for ESPN, but we’re talking about falling back to the amount of money these leagues were making 6 years ago, not a threat to the business model.
I think flying around the world to different places to play in tennis/golf tournaments is a pretty big risk even though your actual playing time is >2m apart.
Besides Coronavirus,all the talk in the office is about NFL Free Agency, because it’s pretty much the only thing going on. Unfortunately all the big signings are over, but the draft is soon!
Tough as a Bears fan. I would have preferred Dalton at QB because he is more consistent than Foles, but Foles has a lot more upside and Dalton has no playoff wins. The Defensive Front 7 look pretty damn strong, but overall the D is lacking a bit on depth and we’re pulling in a lot of under-performing first round picks that we hope will perform competently.
Unfortunately I still don’t think we’ve got a lot of run game strength, and I don’t think Jimmy Graham is going to fix our ailing TE corps. Hopefully the new OL coach gets the line in shape, otherwise next year is going to be another huge disappointment.
My biggest disappointment about sports right now is that the Bulls cannot tank for better odds in the lottery, but at least the Bulls are not the Knicks.
This is fascinating to me. In my circles, none of the usual sports guys are talking about sports anymore, at all.
I think it’s extremely unlikely (< 1%) that more than a tiny percentage of sports fans will not go back to following sports after all of this is over.
People genuinely enjoy following sports. It's not just mindless habit that you quit once you realize you never needed it. Except for a few extreme cases everyone is fully aware that they don't need sports, they follow it because they enjoy the tribalism, the excitement/tension of hoping that are going to win and the camaraderie that comes with being on the same side as the people you hang out with.
None of that is going away if you don’t do it for a couple of months.
Loads of sports take a break for the summer or winter – it doesn’t dent their popularity when they come back.
A lot of people are “sports fans” and when one sport is off, they follow others. The NFL may be on offseason, but they still watch ESPN every day to stay up to date on baseball or whatever.
Having all sports gone at once is basically unprecedented.
@Matt M
They’re not all gone!
I think the big issue for professional sports is going to be the locked in nature of player compensation vs the short term economic impacts. Three basketball teams have $130 million in committed salary for the 2021/2022 season. If revenue drops over the next few years those teams are going to be losing substantial amounts of money, and it will be harder to move those contracts with the salary cap contracting.
The terms of NBA contracts actually include some provisions for preserving the agreed-upon revenue split in the case of unexpected shortfalls and surpluses, including paying out less than the nominal value of the contract (some of the contract money is actually held in escrow until the end of the season against this possibility).
There’ll be some messiness particularly regarding the immovability of max contracts signed under a higher cap if the cap crashes down a bunch, but regarding the nominal dollar values committed the way to think about it is that what’s actually going on is an agreement to divide revenue about 50-50 between owners and players, with the nominal dollar values reflecting the players’ division of their share, and usually being about accurate because the league usually knows about how much money it’ll make in a given year.
This is true for the NHL as well I’m pretty sure.
Player contracts aren’t literally locked in to fixed amounts like that no matter what… that’s just how it gets reported.
There are some provisions, but they won’t be strong enough for a large decline in revenue.
1. There are large asymmetries across NBA teams. The Warriors went from 1 title in 2 years to 3 in 4 largely because of the timing of a relatively small (compared to what this decline is likely to be) jump in the salary cap which allowed them to sign Durant while keeping their next 4 best players on the roster.
2. The trade hits for highly paid players will be larger relative to the cap. Because teams must either take back 80%+ of the salary they trade out or trade into cap space the relative size of their cap figure matters a lot. Combined with the fact that there will be less overall cap space in the off season to trade players into it will make moving expensive players more difficult and costly.
I think you are very wrong about the dynamics: sports fans (at least ones serious enough to attend matches in person) aren’t going to notice that they get on fine without sports; they’re going to desperately miss sports and be ravenous for live sporting events to attend and televised sport to watch. I do not think we will see a medium term downturn in attendance.
What I do think we’ll see is a ton of teams going bust because they don’t have the ability to cope with an extended shutdown. Not really big teams, not NFL franchises or Premier League clubs, but teams from the lower tiers of professional soccer, or the lower echelons of the top tiers in less wealthy leagues.
Not sure how many there are out of the UK, but I imagine the independent Newsagents are all going to go as well. They’ve lost a big chunk of their revenue to the transition to digital media, and health food fads, and the general decline of the highstreet. Doubt you’ll see them anywhere except for the towns where they serve as the local shop.
That’s, what, newspapers, magazines, snacks, that sort of thing? Small storefronts you pop into on your way to or from work?
Yeah, that’s less common in the US outside of dense urban areas like NYC, Washington, and Chicago (gas stations fill the niche elsewhere). I can’t imagine they’re going to be doing well at all during this period.
Are the independant newsagents and corner shops even that independant any more.
I have a vague impression that a lot of them are just costcutters etc. once you look a bit deeper.
That seems unlikely to me – newsagents and corner shops have been designated as essential in the UK, meaning they are allowed to stay open during the lockdown.
The fact that they have even survived until now suggests they are pretty resilient anyway. That resilience is driven mostly by location and variety of stock – they are invariably easy to pop into on the way to or from work, or to nip out to when you realise you’ve forgotten something essential, and can usually be relied on to have most basic household goods.
I wouldn’t be surprised if their fortunes improve, actually.
If there’s any justice in the world, the fact that we’re spending a couple of weeks talking about how the Federal government already knows how much money you make and can just send you a check automatically will kill tax-filing companies, but there isn’t and it won’t.
Hmm? But don’t they know precisely because of the tax return you filed?
No, usually all of the corporations who send you your W-2s and 1099s and whatnot also have already filed with the government.
Ah. Duh. Good point. What was I thinking?
To be honest, though: While it strikes me as faintly absurd to say so out loud, the current system has the virtue of transparency.
No, wait, let me explain.
I maintain a python script that essentially duplicates what TurboTax does for me (which is a small part of TurboTax because my taxes are pretty straightforward). I have to update it every year because the Feds change some damn thing. (This year it was that the threshhold for medical expenses was still 7.5% of AGI; I thought it was supposed to be 10% this year.) But (a) doing that reconciliation means that I have a sanity check on TurboTax — sometimes getting my script to match tells me that I forgot to tell TurboTax something important, and (b) the updated script usually lets me do fairly accurate predictions of what the next year’s tax bill will be as the year progresses. If the Feds just sent me a bill, I wouldn’t have that.
But of course that brings me to the objection I forgot to mention — the Feds do not (yet) keep track of what I spent on medical. I don’t think they even keep track of what I donate to charity, though I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility that they might strong-arm the charitable organizations into telling them.
If you want to have a conversation about eliminating deductions, I might be there. But I seriously think in general that the only sensible order of events is (step one) vastly, vastly, vastly simplify the tax code, and (step two) then, and only then, leave it to the Feds to calculate it for everybody. But if you do step one, step two becomes pointless.
My thought is that with the current expanded standard deduction, tracking deductions is moot for most. Admittedly I don’t know the numbers.
Yes itemized deductions are much less common than they used to be. But everyone still has a filing status. The government doesn’t know that. And lots of people have kids, which the government also doesn’t know (except by looking at tax returns). And education credits can only be partially done by the government, which lots of folks take.
I would very much like the US to get to the point they can do our taxes for us. I saw an estimate of 18 million who still itemize. Filing status and dependents can’t be done by the government. If they would simplify this by eliminating itemized altogether, eliminate filing status, eliminating education credits, and eliminating dependency credits, then I think the IRS could take care of filing for most people. I’d also like to see identical tax rates for all levels of income, so wage withholding would take care of all taxes and most wouldn’t need to file at all! But then, I also believe in purple unicorns.
For the kids social security registration, for education student loan filings, marriages are tougher at the federal level but there’s no reason they ask for the records from 50 states instead of 100 million households.
Yes, in all these some would slip through the cracks. Those people can still file tax returns.
@Mark V Anderson
You are aware that there are plenty of nations where the government files for you by default, and you only file if you need to submit a correction or do taxes based on specific information the government doesn’t have access to, right? There’s nothing in the US tax code that means that it can’t do what these other nations are doing.
I am definitely aware of this. It is my goal to get to where other nations are. And in fact I know that in New Zealand most people don’t file a return at all, because withholding takes care of their obligation.
There are definitely things in the US tax code that currently make this impossible. That was the whole point of my post. If those complications could be removed, then the government could do this.
And no, brad, social security registration by the kids does not tell the government who can take these kids as dependents, only that someone can. Education is closer, but the filings with the Feds don’t include books. And there are some education expenses that qualify for the credit but don’t require a Federal filing. But perhaps for the education case a default return done by the government, to be fixed by the taxpayer if necessary, would work.
But that process should, could, and would already be a two-click web form for like 90% of filers, except for the tax filing companies explicitly working against all efforts to make the tax system* more streamlined. Treasury were supposed to have this all automated in 2008 by statute, but it keeps being blocked by industry lobbying. Imagine if Tax Day just means you go to auto-tax.gov or whatever and sign off on a prepopulated form with all your W-2-covered income and the standard deduction included.
*Just the infrastructure. The code, too, obviously, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
This is more about (what used to be) the 1040A/1040EZ crowd.
If your only source of income is a wage and you don’t have capital gains, the IRS already has all of the information to figure your taxes, filed by your employer with your withholding.
IRS could send a letter to everyone saying “As long as you meet (insert conditions here), $X is the amount you owe (or are being refunded), file a tax return by 4/15 if this is not the case.”
Conventional wisdom is that a Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition of tax-prep companies and anti-tax activists have enough political muscle to keep this from happening.
ETA: ninja’d by Statismagician
Tesla’s model is in serious trouble. They did raise a bunch of cash right before it hit with an equity offering so that will get them through the interim but they are facing
1. Much lower gas prices in the near term which will make it a lot harder to be cost competitive with ICE cars.
2. A dramatic drop in market wealth, if this doesn’t revert quickly you will likely see fewer luxury purchases in the next couple of years.
3. A massive hit to China which was their only growing market coming into this quarter.
Given that they are heavily invested in short term growth these are serious issues for them.
Eh, I dunno.
I feel like Tesla’s core appeal has been “cool tech / luxury status symbol” rather than “something that saves you money on gas” for at least a few years now already (and the person who is in the market for such a car isn’t the type of person for whom gasoline is a significant portion of their expenses already, anyway).
Even if gasoline was literally free, I think a whole lot of people would still desire Teslas anyway…
Tesla has been unprofitable on that model, and continuing to follow it would certainly bankrupt them eventually. They specifically targeted a $35,000 sedan with the model 3 because that was roughly where the lower cost of ownership of the Tesla would make it cost competitive with the most popular sedans in the US (or larger economy cars like the Civic).
I’m very interested in what happens to streaming services after people return to work. If this is multiple months of large chunks of people staying home then there might be an effect where they basically watched everything that they want to watch, couple that with some belt tightening after the fact and while it seems obvious that streamers will do well in the short term I wonder what will happen in the long term? I know we (not big TV watchers) cancelled our Netflix subscription years ago, we were going in a rotation of services, picking on up that had something we wanted until we had finished it and then moving on. If you have watched everything you want to see, why not cancel a few of them for a while?
I suspect that this will be the final nail in the coffin for a lot of brick and mortar retail shops. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few places like Sears, JC Penneys, Bed Bath & Beyond, etc don’t reopen their doors.
Jim Cramer has been predicting we’ll exit the Plague with only three retailers: Amazon, Wal-Mart and Costco.
The big picture is looking so good for Amazon that I’ve been asking in this OT if I should buy shares despite working there (thus contra conventional investment advice).
I think that’s probably overstating it, (I don’t think Target is going anywhere any time soon, for example), but I do agree that Amazon has positioned themselves very well, and I while I wouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket, I also think they are worth owning.
I know not to put all my eggs in one basket. The Chat family portfolio is only overweighted toward high-yield dividend aristocrat ABBV (which I judged to be safer than T or either oil aristocrat), because this is our first experience with a bear market and re-balancing by selling down to max 10% would still be selling lower than the original cost basis (down 3% vs. 16.5% loss in our S&P 500 index).
If we hold any AMZN, it’ll be <10% with a total exposure to retail of <15%, re-balancing if the top retailers go on a tear in the bear.
I wonder how much we are lowering contagion risk by shifting retailing from in-store to online. If you have staff putting out goods in stores, and shoppers picking things up there and paying for them, you have interaction, sure. But you also have interaction if you have staff picking and packing in warehouses, delivery drivers driving around town and dropping stuff off, and people accepting delivery.
Ok, but in a physical store you have the added risk of random shoppers wandering in and fondling the merchandise. There may also be some risk involved in using cash or typing your pin into the card machine that dozens of others have touched that day.
Not to mention that, schools and cafes being closed, people would go hang out in stores just to pass the time, so that’s additional crowding.
Delivery may not be completely risk free, but it’s reduced by a lot.
Let’s draw this out a bit. There are probably three ways you can catch this crap:
a. Close contact–basically you kiss or cough on me or something.
b. Fomites aka stuff you sneezed on that I touch, and then later I touch my eye or mouth or something.
c. Airborne–you cough or sneeze or whatever and I walk through the cloud of airborne droplets that contain virus and inhale some or get some in my eye/nose/mouth.
Suppose I either go to the store and shop normally, have something brought out to my car, or order it for delivery by mail. (Target offers all three options.)
Normal Shopping:
(a) If I end up brushing against someone, standing in line next to them, or if I suddenly decide I should run up and hug/kiss/shake hands with strangers at the store, I’ll maybe get direct contact. I can mostly avoid this, but maybe I get exposed to one or two people this way.
(b) Every item I touch, including the shopping cart and the checkout, is potentially contaminated by hundreds of people, maybe even people in the store a couple days ago. If the cashier is contagious, his hands are on my goods and bags and maybe he’s handing me change.
(c) Anyone who has coughed or sneezed in the store may have left a cloud of airborne droplets I walk through. I’ll avoid coughing/sneezing people if I can, but I’m still going to walk through clouds that haven’t settled out onto surfaces yet. If we assume this settles out/dies off in a couple or three hours, then maybe I’m exposed to 50-100 people this way in a big store.
The last time I went to a store to do shopping in-person, I wore a mask and my regular glasses, sanitized my hands several times, and tried to avoid getting close to anyone. I paid by card, and used the card reader without getting any change back or anything. When I got home, I tossed all my clothes in the washer and took a shower, to minimize my chances of catching this crap in case I got exposed. I had my kids wipe everything they could with a disinfecting wipe to clean it before we put it away.
Car Pick-Up:
(a) The only person I’m potentially directly exposed to is the person who brings out my stuff, and I can mostly avoid even that.
(b) Any items I get may be contaminated like before, or by the shopper/cashier, but I don’t have to touch any of them–I can just touch the bags. In fact, we’ve been leaving nonperishable things in the bags for several days before touching them. My local Target will only do car pick-up for nonperishable things, so I can just let the virus decay for a few days. I still end up touching the handles of the bags, but that’s it.
(c) The whole pickup takes place outside, where there’s minimal chance of lingering clouds of virus droplets, in a not-that-crowded parking place. At most I’m exposed to one person, probably not even that.
Last time I did this, I sanitized my hands and let the stuff we bought sit for a few days before messing with it.
Delivery:
(a) No exposure
(b) Same as pick-up, but any virus on the items ordered has time to decay while the item is in transit. The people handling the packages may add virus to the packaging, though.
(c) No exposure.
We have ordered a few things for delivery, and we’ve let them sit for awhile before opening, and washed our hands after opening them.
It seems like delivery is a little less exposure than pick-up, and like pick-up is enormously less exposure than normal shopping. And this goes both ways–the employees and other shoppers at my local Target are far less likely to catch the virus from me if I do car pick up than if I shop normally, too.
So while we’re all bunkered down, I thought I’d do a little research project on the side. I found out the California Department of Public Health has records on all the ICU beds in the state of California and I thought it would be interesting to map them out in relation to Coronavirus infections. Since a lot of Coronavirus patients need ICU care, this would give us a pretty good idea of when local healthcare would get overwhelmed and doctors would need to start making difficult decisions.
I threw up a website to track it, but the basic breakdown is that a lot of coastal regions around SF and south will be in trouble. Santa Cruz is a good example, there may only be 25 cases right now but the whole county only has 13 Intensive Care Beds: 10 at Dominican Hospital and 3 at Watsonville Community Hospital. It won’t take a lot of cases to overwhelm them. Similar stories for Marin county, San Benito, and San Luis Obispo.
So, besides the fact that I’d love some feedback because I’m trying to polish it, what’s the policy on transferring sick patients? Lets say your local community hospital is at max capacity with Coronavirus cases; can and should you travel to someplace like Fresno which looks like it’ll have excess capacity? Can the doctors at your local hospital transfer you somewhere else?
The political rhetoric is that we’ll treat a pandemic like WWII, so I would think the National Guard and regular armed forces would be throwing up ICUs where modeling shows they’ll get overwhelmed.
Or our government could completely fail to live up to the competence the rhetoric alludes to. That too.
> Can the doctors at your local hospital transfer you somewhere else?
Yes. A good amount of ambulances you see on the street are transferring patients from one healthcare facility to another. Usually one end is a nursing home. But we do a lot of transfers between hospitals for various reasons, including a lack of required facilities at the hospital where the patient currently is.
The more relevant question probably is – can a hospital with empty beds refuse to accept transfer patients from outside its normal area?
99% of the time there’s no reason they would. But now… if you’re Fresno and you have a few empty beds, are you allowed to keep a few empty beds for potential Fresno cases? Or do you have to allow all the beach-dwellers access to your beds on a first-come, first-serve basis?
I can only tell you about how things “normally” work.
Broadly, the Emergency Department has to evaluate/stabilize any patient who shows up at their door due to EMTLA. When it comes to admissions, there are only a few standard reasons that someone won’t be admitted at the hospital they arrived at. For most of them, they’ll be transferred to an affiliated hospital. This if for things like needing a higher level of care or a specialty resource center. These all have advanced negotiated admissions or transfer agreements so it’s pretty trivial to manage.
If they are transferred to an unaffiliated hospital it’s usually because of insurance reasons.
But it’s *really* hard to force another hospital to take a transfer of a patient they don’t want. The receiving hospital can just say “no”. If the sending hospital just lies and claims that they have an approved transfer and puts the patient in an ambulance to take to the other hospital in hopes that they do something, there are criminal, civil, and ethical rules being violated by the facilities and the doctors involved. If I have to transport a patient 150 miles because you purposefully lied to me, I will do everything in my power to destroy you; mistakes happen, though.
As for what you should do, I don’t know. If you are otherwise feeling fine you probably should be staying home. If you are sick to the point that you need an ICU bed I’m not certain that you should be taking a 2-hour detour to get there.
In the end, it’s going to boil down more to the capabilities and leadership of the hospital rather than the specifics of the number of ICU beds technically available. Though available ICU beds is probably a good indicator that resources are available.
An obvious problem is that you could end up with all nearby hospitals also swamped.
If only we had built California’s high speed rail by now: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/25/france-sends-medical-fast-train-relocate-sick-badly-hit-area/
A reanimator? So the French are into necromancy now?
Necromancy may look romantic to outsiders, but actually it’s mostly digging.
–shamelessly stolen from Oglaf.com (NSFW)
They’ve given up trying to lower the death rate, and they’re trying other strategies?
We’ll soon have too many old people, and not enough workers. So choose: more babies, more immigrants, or legions of the undead.
I can stomach most of the bailouts, not that I love them, but the cruise ship companies are really a bridge too far. Let them seek bailouts from Libera and Panama. Where are the nationalists on this one?
From the comments at Unz it seems they’re busy engaging in a food fight between supporters and opponents of Trump. I know because I’ve been participating. This has been going on for years but I’ve never seen it quite the level of viciousness that I’m seeing now. It’s gotten so bad at the Lion of Blogosphere site that comments have been disabled.
If the results of the Plague are that absurd and corrupt, Albert Camus’s stock goes way up.
I oppose this bailout too.
Good news!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-cruise-ship-lines-wouldnt-qualify-for-aid-under-stimulus-package-11585249527
This is a 100% fair point.
Excellent point. Agreed.
I am 100% on board with American bailout money going only to companies incorporated in America. Although I would hope any funds earmarked directly for aid to employees would still go to their employees who work in the States.
I’m not sure this is as simple as it sounds. First, I’m sure that RCL et al do have US subsidiaries, and their accountants are no doubt packing all of the losses they can onto them. Second, there are lots of foreign companies that have serious US operations which aren’t engaging in more than the normal level of international tax dodging. Someone who works for Airbus, or BAE, or Toyota. I’d hope there’d be some international agreement on bailing out either operations or companies. Either way works, but a patchwork is going to be a mess.
I’m not sure where the cruise ship companies are headquartered, but the ship registries are just another form of offshoring to save costs. Parts of the company could still be in the US. Maybe only Jones Act (US flagged) vessels should be eligible for bailouts, but I don’t think any cruise ships are, only cargo.
The company I work for has some employees in other countries, should it be excluded from bailouts–hard to say in a globalized economy. Maybe this is why giving the bailouts to the US employees directly is seen by some to be more effective.
As I understand it, what country the ship is registered under determines which country’s labor laws apply, and also which laws apply if a passenger sues.
There’s only one cruise ship registered with the U.S., and it’s run by Norwegian Cruise Lines (which is American despite the name).
One reason to prefer giving money to workers is that some businesses will likely have a lot less business after the lockdowns are over. I’m guessing it will be at least a few years until the cruise ship business fully recovers. Other businesses will have more business. It would be better to let the doomed businesses close down and help people along with surviving till they can move onto the not-doomed businesses.
I think this is the best answer so far. Cruise companies asking for bailouts is essentially the US investors in those companies (or maybe the loan holders) wanting to have their investments protected. But does that make any sense for a non-essential industry whose main workforce is foreign (not protecting that many US jobs), and whose recovery is 3-5 years away? Better to help the US employees (office workers, dock workers, and local secondary businesses) find useful work in industries that recover faster and are more “needed.”
I do feel bad for the thousands of foreign cruise ship personnel and particularly for the small islands where the cruise ships dock and pump money into the economy.
I think the investors in cruise ships may not have seen this risk, but it doesn’t mean it’s a risk they should be guaranteed against.
I believe Royal Caribbean and Carnival are actually incorporated in Liberia and Panama, respectively, despite their headquarters being located in the US.
Not quite a nationalist, but I’m definitely with you on this one. They’ve been leaders in gaming international regulations to their advantage, and should reap the rewards now.
Of course, I also dislike the cruise industry for other reasons. (Poor labor practices and awful ships spring to mind.)
I want to tabulate some data that will help compare responses to Covid across states. My current plan is to record, for each state, the date and number of cases when they …
– closed public schools
– declared a state of emergency
– banned large gatherings
– imposed a curfew
– closed non-essential businesses
– imposed a shelter in place.
Hopefully this, along with some auxiliary data (like population, date of first case), will give a rough picture of how “ahead of the curve” each state acted.
Does anyone have suggestions? Should I include other events or disinclude some that I listed? Is there other information that I should also tabulate? I’m trying to keep this relatively low-effort while also being somewhat useful.
If possible case distribution would be important too (as this dictates whether a city/region is ordered closed, or the entire state is ordered closed). But I doubt you’d have easy enough access to this data to do this.
Are you planning to do this by hand or programmatically?
I think tracking down the data individually could end up being very tine consuming
Not to rain on the parade too much (it was cancelled as a social-distancing measure anyway), but available case data are really, really awful, and known to be really, really awful, because of how badly FDA bungled the whole testing thing. If the point of this is to look at what measures matter most at what point in the infection curve, I suggest not bothering, because we don’t know where on the infection curve anywhere actually is.
What you might be able to do is put together a per-test positive finding rate for like testing regimes by, say, week, and work off of that, but raw confirmed-case numbers are too dependent on local policy and too low in absolute terms to tell you anything useful at this stage. CDC has more grant money and grad students than you do and will release reams of data on this over the next few years; the best ROI is probably just waiting until that starts coming out.
I think this is a very interesting data set, and it would be great for comparing outcomes. As mentioned, it might need to be at the county/city level, because that’s where some of the first actions were taken.
In response to the coronavirus, I did
what I was going to do anywaythe socially responsible thing and got 100% of the achievements for Final Fantasy VII just in time for the remake release date.So how about that ending? Gur cbfg-perqvgf fprar fubjf nofbyhgryl ab rivqrapr gung nal uhznaf ner fgvyy nyvir. Zl ulcbgurfvf vf gung orersg bs Znxb raretl, uhznavgl fjvgpurq onpx gb pbny naq PNTJ’rq gurzfryirf gb qrngu.
#ShinraDidNothingWrong
Vg’f n tnzr jurer lbh cynl nf n zna jvgu jrveq oybaqr unve jubfr rneyvrfg fhccbegre jnf na harzcylrq sbezre pbny zvare. Pbvapvqrapr?
Technically Barret was Cloud’s employer, but that angle was not lost on me.
It goes deeper than that. Consider that juvyr uhznaf ner abg frra va gur svany ivqrb, naq Zvqtne vf n ehva, Erq KVVV’f enpr ner frra ebnzvat serryl. Erq’f xvaq ner dhvgr ener va gur tnzr vgfrys–ur’f gur bayl yvivat ulran-qbt-png-guvatl jr rapbhagre, va fcvgr bs bfgrafvoyl yvivat sbe praghevrf. Gurer fubhyq or ybgf bs gurz, ohg gurer nera’g.
Nqq va gung gurl ynpx bccbfnoyr guhzof, naq Erq uvzfrys vf n qrpvqrqyl zrqvbper punenpgre va onggyr; Pybhq, Pvq, Lhssvr, Oneerg, Nrevf, naq rira Gvsn ner cerggl pyrneyl zber rssrpgvir ol gur raq bs gur tnzr. Pybhq vf gur fgebatrfg bs gur ybg, naq tbg gung jnl ol hfvat Znxb. Bhe urebrf unir perngrq n jbeyq jurer gurl ner abg guevivat, ohg n culfvpnyyl vasrevbe lrg ybatre-yvirq enpr nccneragyl cebfcref. Jung qbrf guvf gryy hf?
The implication is that if the Cetra are able to thrive (no longer hunted down), they can guide humans towards more sustainable mechanisms, supported by scientists like Reeve. So in the future, humans have likely gone full solarpunk. This is not mutually exclusive with a much smaller human population (sustainable utopia causing demographic change with a much lower replacement equilibrium point), such that they don’t need to have a noticeable active presence in a grand sweep of the land.
Which is to say, that Mako was a Molochian minimum, an intermediate step on how to utilize the Lifestream to power technology, and the issue was that they stopped at that step (zvfyrq ol gur pbasyngvba bs WRABIN naq gur Prgen), instead of seeking to improve the process into cleaner conversion.
This suffers from the problem of the Cetra all being dead, and there’s no sign that they ever intended to return to the Planet.
Sequel games/films show that at least Cloud can somewhat communicate with the Lifestream, and the Cetra in it (and also Zack, which implies other Mako-heavy dead).
I have nowhere else to ask this question:
Is there a reason used medical PPE isn’t bagged and sent to a gamma-ray or x-ray facility for sterilization? Sure, it would be less than ideal as the PPE is still in a used condition, but it would be better than re-using without sterilization.
Apparently radiation sterilization doesn’t work well for viruses. There’s a Dutch study that was posted in an earlier thread showing that hydrogen peroxide vapor sterilization works, but only a few times before the mask doesn’t seal any more. Not sure if anyone’s tried UV-C with coronavirus, but it has been tried with influenza.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4974539/
Says that 3 Mrad killed all the viruses in this study. But I’m glad people are considering this, which is all I wanted to know.
I think the limiting factors for the mask lifespan are the structural integrity of the mask (especially the seal) and the filter becoming clogged with particles.
In general:
It isn’t rated for such use. And nobody wants to take the legal/regulatory risk of doing so.
… And because no one is sure that the PPE will work properly after it’s been used for X hours then sent through radiation.
There’s a lot of knee-jerk blaming of regulations going on these days (much justified!), but most of the time, the regulation’s there for a reason, and many times, it’s even a good reason!
People in New York City are fleeing the city and bringing the disease everywhere they go and no one is even talking about doing anything to stop them. That is insane.
At the very least, we should be shutting down the interstates leading to the state.
Several states are actually requesting quarantine for anyone leaving New York.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/florida-announces-required-14-day-isolation-for-anyone-traveling-from-new-york-or-new-jersey_3283717.html
Now, the ability to enforce it with American freedom of movement is untested.
The 70s called, they want their disaster movie plotlines back. Do we have the requisite gangs of toothless banjo-plucking shotgun-toting rednecks lurching out of the forests and from the road sides to menace and warn away the fleeing city slickers?
I shouldn’t be laughing about this, it’s incredulous laughter I swear! No, but it’s the unintentionally enjoyable, for all us rubes, culchies, hicks from the sticks and rednecks, flipside of the “Yeah but I wanna live in a big cosmopolitan metropolis because of all the vibrancy and opportunity! I’d hate to be stuck out the country or in some small town or – yuck! – suburb!”
What’s the matter, people, all the “I can walk down any street and have a choice of sixteen different quaint ethnic restaurants to eat at!” not enough to make up for The Masque of the Red Death?
If the government banning international travelers is a serious proposal, then why aren’t internal travel restrictions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_United_States_law
It turns out we’re doing a lot of things we didn’t think we would do. And that causes less damage than shutting down all the businesses in every city.
So rule of law is out the window and the government can do anything it wants as long as it claims it is better than not doing it?
Yeah, blocking off highways is the line that separates liberal democracies from totalitarian states.
If blocking off the highways is so unlikely, why has every major “essential” corporation issued passes/letters to their employees saying “this is an essential employee, please let them through”? (I got mine today!)
If there is a line between the two it is going to be something like this.
They can still shut down the highways (and other roads) to motorized traffic. Leave New York if you want, but you’ll have to do it on foot (or bicycle). There’s never been a guarantee to any particular *mode* of interstate travel.
This is nearly as moustache-twirling villainy as “We guarantee freedom of speech. No one said we guarantee freedom AFTER speech.”
The Federal government shutting down the roads *leaving* NYC feels like some dystopian shit.
Some state far away setting up roadblocks to inspect people *entering* feels sensible and reasonable.
I can probably implement #1 through #2, so I realize my feelings aren’t perfectly rational here.
Perhaps #2 feels more acceptable intuitively since it feels like communities banding together to protect themselves, while #1 feels like throwing people to the wolves.
> This is nearly as moustache-twirling villainy as “We guarantee freedom of speech. No one said we guarantee freedom AFTER speech.”
It’s the whole justification for being able to require (and remove) credentials for operating a motor vehicle. “Driving is a privilege, not a right.” Which I also think is bullshit, but it’s the law of the land.
I see it more as an 80s movie, where our soulless New York go getter moves to the Florida panhandle for safety. However, because he is pretending not to be from NYC (because soulless), he takes on a hayseed persona, resulting in various hilarious complications, among them falling in love with a local girl and realizing that the locals have their own wisdom, and maybe being a corporate go-getter isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Alternatively, we could just remake A Comedy of Errors, where two buddies flee to Appalachia, not realizing that their long lost twins already live there, and …
I keep saying that if barricading the highways going in and out of the Bay Area and NYC and Seattle commuting areas is illegal, we’re going to get enough infections to reach herd immunity (165+ million) AND the stock market crash and greater than Great Depression-level unemployment from the insufficient public health response.
If the USA’s plan is literally “Flatten the curve! Everyone wait your turn to get infected so we don’t run out of hospital equipment!”, that’s beyond insanity.
Read this:
and then thought I read
I am surprised this hasn’t already been done, but it’s a big bridge to cross, and it has to be done by the state governor. Donald Trump ordering the troops in to shut NYC down while De Blasio and Cuomo don’t want it is a great recipe for real bad stuff.
Plus doing something like that is a GREAT way to cause a HUGE fleeing of people outside the city. And the problem is that the rural areas absolutely do not have the capacity to handle all the cases the refugees will inevitably bring with them.
Hawaii apparently already imposed a mandatory 14 day quarantine on all arrivals, even returning residents, but it’s a lot easier to do when you’re an island.
I knew this situation sounded familiar:
So, in the next months we should expect those New Yorkers fleeing to the Catskills to come up with new branches of math and physics.
NYC is our Wuhan but we’re doing nothing to quarantine them. I have not seen a serious discussion of legality but I believe it would be legal to restrict movement for quarantine.
Unless you’re going to enact _Escape from New York_ only with Long Island and Staten Island included too, and somehow get all the
zombiesinfectious from NJ, Westchester, and the Bronx onto one of those islands, I’m not sure how you intend to prevent movement. Without well-defined chokepoints, the troops you put in to prevent movement out of the area are going to have to shoot an awful lot of people.So we’re doomed, then?
Unironically yes. I do not believe it is practical to stop the epidemic from reaching its natural saturation point.
However I believe Cuomo would quite enjoy sealing off parts of New York and shooting anyone who leaves, provided enough Democrats remained north of the Bronx River to keep him in power.
This is why a national response is required. We’re currently relying on Governors, Mayors, and the like to make decisions about when and how much to shut things down. This leaves lots of room for people to go from known hot-spots to known not-quite-as-hot-yet spots. Instead of being subjected to the harsher movement and quarantine restrictions where these would-be travelers would have time to either fight off the disease or seek treatment and hospitalization, they are then free to spread it in the more lax environs.
This problem will be a bigger deal once things are under control in some areas but not others: How do you keep them under control when folks from two states over can just drive in and kick things off again?
This way is the route to periodic peaks and troughs of virus transmission in our country over a long period of time. It’s probably the worst case, where we get the severe economic impact of all of the “stay at home” measures while minimizing the gains from them.
Why should I care whether New Yorkers ‘shelter in place’ at home or come to my state where they will be forced to ‘shelter in place’ here? There’s nowhere they can go that isn’t already shutting down most of the ways they could spread the disease, it’s not like they’re going to be hanging out in our shut-down bars, going to shut-down concerts and cancelled festivals. Maybe they will end up in our hospitals instead of an NYC hospital…but if anything that’s probably what we want, our hospitals aren’t overloaded.
Two reasons. First is because even shelter in place has enough exceptions that they can spread it unwittingly.
The second is because if we are doing local lockdowns right, we can release places without major new outbreaks from the shelter in place while continuing to lock down hard hit places as the Chinese did with Wuhan. If New Yorkers are continually reinfecting places, we are on hold longer.
We do want that. And controlled medical transportation of the sick is the proper way to do it, not getting people onto airplanes where they can infect dozens.
This is called “closing the stable door after the horse is out”.
SARS-Cov2 is out in the rest of the country. Pretending that the problem is “those” people from NYC satisfies your lizard brain desires, but does nothing to stop the community spread that is already occurring all over the place.
Yes, we need to drastically reduce our contacts with other people so that we can reduce the rate of infection to something more manageable, ideally R0 below 1, but at least enough to buy us more time to deal with the crisis. But closing NYC doesn’t stop what is already about to happen in Florida.
At some point you could have been aggressively reducing the possibility for spread in localized areas, and also further contained the spread by doing extensive testing and contact tracing. We are so far past that point it’s not funny.
No, it’s closing the closing the stable door after some of the horses got out. New York is responsible for half of the cases in the US. If they all flee, that means it’s going to spread even more across the country. It’s irrational to say that social distancing is good when it comes to you traveling to a bar but it’s irrelevant when someone traverses across cities and states. It’s obviously not the case that if one person spreads the disease to a different area then we shouldn’t bother trying to keep anyone else from doing the same. That’s ridiculous.
I think you’re both right. Travel restrictions alone are inadequate, and right now there are more important things we need (like lower-48-wide lockdowns), but in a month’s time, when outbreaks are localized, inter-state travel restrictions will be important to keeping future flare-ups localized.
On paper, there are a bunch of reasons we’d prefer people to get out of NYC. It’s moving them from some place where social distancing is nearly impossible (albatross11 has a comment on this elsewhere, control-F for “worst-situated”) to well-distanced suburbs. And every community across the lower 48 needs to go into shelter-in-place, right now, anyway.
But I have sympathy for the receiving communities:
* My community responsibly went into a soft lockdown very early, and if you told me we are getting a bunch of transplants from a place that irresponsibly waited too long, eh, can you maybe pretend you’re asking nicely?
* These people are, according to the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/nyregion/coronavirus-leaving-nyc-vacation-homes.html rich people with vacation homes. They are going to show up and expect to be able to buy a month’s worth of supplies wherever they land. That puts a shitload of pressure on a smaller town, like a 4 square-mile island with 230 people on it.
* Again in the NYT, Southampton went from population 60K to population 100K in two weeks. Not withstanding having 40K millionaires move into your town to bid up prices, at a base rate of 1:1000 in NYC, it means you just dropped in about 40 new cases. It’s easy for me, 1000 miles away, to not worry too much about a handful of New Yorkers who might end up here. Not so much for smaller suburbs near by.
* Shelter-in-place means shelter-in-the-place-you-are-at-now, not shelter-all-over-the-place. A bunch of people moving in from a hot-zone during shelter-in-place is like people having big house parties or hosting NBA games during shelter-in-place: you are resetting the clock. If lots of people keep on pouring in, a destination community will never finish taking their medicine.
* Again, these are rich people showing up in your town, so being told to shut up and accept what millionaires tell you to do or else you are a stupid lizard probably isn’t going to help matters much.
Once community transmission starts, a few more cases locally have no impact on where you are going.
If you have 50 cases that will double in a couple of days to 100, the extra one case makes no difference in the large progression of the disease. 8 days out, you either have 800 cases or you have 816 cases. It’s a rounding error.
Even if the fleeing new NYC resident raises your case load to 2 from 1 (and assuming you don’t have a local program in place that is sufficient to actually prevent spread via community transmission), all you have done is changed your time to 800+ cases by two days, i.e. one doubling.
Restrictions on all sorts of activity, including travel, is necessary. But think that sealing off of NYC by itself matters at this point is … not rational. Everyone, everywhere needs to be restricting movement and reducing/eliminating contacts. We have sufficient cases (and mostly undetected cases) in all of the states to do the work of spreading the disease.
Not necessarily. Where would Korea be if Patient 31 was instead someone who stayed at home playing video games? A single case can be very hard to predict.
Some people are more likely to spread to a large number of people than others for a variety of reasons we can’t necessarily predict or control. The sort of person who didn’t take their current shelter-in-place seriously may be more likely to take other measures less seriously and pose a greater than typical risk to the traveled to community.
There are also many other factors to consider. Increasing the population of small towns can have other negative effects related to transmission, even if none of the incoming population is infected. For instance a grocery store that now supports more people will be more crowded, potentially causing some already existing infected people to be crowded closer together or come into closer/more frequent contact with others than they might have otherwise, which can also increase transmission rates.
@semioldguy:
That’s not any more or less true of an added case from NYC (or Tallahassee or Greenville or wherever).
We are talking about population scale risks here, not early butterfly effects on which turtle pokes its head out of the shell first. Once community transmission is going, it’s going to progress absent specific measures to disrupt it. Early progression is going to look noisier, but the further you get into the progression, the more the currently infectious resemble the “average” patient.
If we were in a situation where you could guarantee no local transmission of the disease, then imposing border controls could potentially be effective. But a) that would have to prevent incoming infection from everywhere, not just NY, and b) that’s not the world we are currently in.
What needs to be happening is to do what is possible to slow the local spread of disease, no matter who is currently “local”.
Mostly agreeing with HBC on this one. If your local measures, shelter-in-place or whatever, are enough to keep R0<1.0 locally, then you can survive the fleeing New Yorkers – each one will cause some small but finite number of additional cases, mostly among whatever friends or family decided to host fleeing New Yorkers. If your local measures are not sufficient to keep R0<1.0, you're already doomed to a local epidemic even if you completely seal your state's borders.
There's a partial exception if you are locally at the margin of lifting shelter-in-place and going to contact tracing, but the fleeing New Yorkers are too numerous for your local health department to track. But that's a temporary, marginal case, and I'm skeptical you can do anything about it anyway. Fleeing New Yorkers will be roughly divided between those who will self-isolate for two weeks if you ask firmly but politely, and those who will sneak into your state unannounced short of the kind of enforcement measures where you need Kurt Russel to star in the movie you're making because we're beyond real-world plausible.
Which can overwhelm a smaller health system. This needs to be considered when looking at where they are fleeing to.
Which is what everyone should be doing to all New Yorkers right now. Florida already is.
I agree that we don’t yet need to turn Manhattan into a prison island, but “if you’ve left New York, quarantine for two weeks” needs to be the standard.
If you’re even plausibly at the point of lifting shelter-in-place and going to contract tracing, you’re well past the peak of your local outbreak but your local health care system is probably still geared up for peak-outbreak caseloads.
You’re right that it should be considered, but it’s unlikely to be decisive and I’m seeing a lot more “keep the filthy New Yorkers out” than I am careful consideration of the relevant factors.
@John Schilling
There is a joke going about in my circles:
“So we need to keep everyone who comes from New York in quarantine when they first arrive”
“And this will help with the virus?”
“What virus?”
I think the way Florida is doing it is correct. New Yorkers aren’t going to be banned from travel, but quarantined for a couple of weeks to prevent new clusters from emerging.
I am dubious that the Florida quarantine will work. As far as I can tell it is an order to self quarantine for 2 weeks after arriving at an airport. Anyone flying into the state to live in the condo they own there isn’t going to have 2 weeks of basic necessities stored up, and just getting from the airport to the condo is going to require interactions with airport personnel, a rental car company, gas stations etc etc.
Those of us from the NYC area may be fools, but we’re not stupid. If we want to go to Florida to visit our relatives and perhaps check on the status of any potential inheritance that just might (cough cough) be coming sooner than we expected, we’ll just fly out of Philadelphia.
Texas just ordered quarantines for people coming from New York AND New Orleans…
@The Nybbler
I am pretty sure they’re mostly like @John Schilling suggested and “ask firmly but politely” rather than men with guns. If we get to men with guns, then point of origin will be tracked a lot more closely.
@Matt M
That’s great news. Thanks.
Nine-year-old daughter chatting with a bunch of friends on Zoom: “One at a time! If you all talk at once, no one can hear what you say. Ava, you go first, and then Isabel, and then me.” Future project manager.
If there’s one thing this enforced time at home is going to teach kids, it’s how to be the ideal remote workers of the future. What do you all think will be the global effect of a two-month shutdown on elementary schoolers? Will it make them better people? Less materialistic? Less easily bored? We are engaged in a global psychological experiment of unprecedented scale, I hope someone is collecting data.
Can I hire your daughter to run my meetings? I can’t for the life of me get any of the engineers I work with to take turns like that.
I don’t know, but my five year old daughter did a Google Hangouts video chat with about 10 kids from her pre-K this morning and it was adorable.
The follies of voice calls. Clearly text chat is superior, no such issues with talking over people or interruption or whatever.
That’s just called “a poorly run meeting”. We have daily voice/video calls with zero issues.
+1
Get a good moderator and it works quickly and well.
I wasn’t serious about this, more of a personal preference for how I can type whenever they want, and carry on multiple threads of conversations simultaneously in a text chat setting.
The social norms around interruption can also be unpredictable, exacerbated if there’s no video to check body language or facial cues.
A text setting is also much more forgiving to an infodumper, as people can ignore any information they already know, whether it was given in a condescending way or not, rather than it taking up airspace that someone else could be talking in.
Well, it’s also possible that you are having meetings that shouldn’t actually be meetings. Or have people attending meetings that’d not need to.I know their are places where people spend something like half of their time in meetings.
But that’s not really an issue with voice only meetings, per-se. Having them in person would be slightly less bad.
Maybe I’ve just been blessed to have never been in job with bad meeting culture.
Oh, with business meetings I can understand the advantages of voice calls. But for a social meetup, as is the case with Bobobob’s daughter, there are no downsides to chat other than reading speed. This is what is driving the popularity of Discord, no? All of the servers I’ve been in, people have to beg others to join the voice call server, instead of just text chatting.
Typing speed is also a problem.
Personally, I’ve railed against how difficult it is to keep one person from talking over everyone in voice chats before, but it’s also the case that at least one person is reliably extraordinarily slow at typing every damn reply.
The WSJ Has an article mirroring my point in the other thread that paying attention to the curves of “positive tests” doesn’t make sense. They even make the point about how Wuhan likely had many more cases than ever reported.
Don’t you know not to read the WSJ opinion page?
In your Wuhan quote, where are they getting 6k cases in greater Wuhan? Do they mean the number recorded on January 31? Since the evacuee test was on 14 February, the comparison should the 14 February number, and probably much later. For all of China it was 66k. I don’t know how much of that was Wuhan or Hubei, but I’d think pretty much everyone in Wuhan was going to be diagnosed was diagnosed by then. Ultimately, the official figures were that Wuhan, population 11 million had 50k cases and 2.5k deaths, an infection rate of 0.45% and a case fatality rate of 5%. If there really were 1% of the population infected, then that drops the IFR to 2.2%. Should we look at greater Wuhan? I’m not going to, because I don’t know what it is, let along have numbers for it. (The official infection rate is much less for the rest of Hubei, but the CFR is the same.)
They didn’t choose Vò because it was representative, but because it was the center of the outbreak, the first case in Veneto and the first death in all of Italy! So extrapolating to all of Padua is fraud. How many of those 90 people (or 70, according to wikipedia) have died?
To my mind, one of the important conclusions of this event is that it rules out one
of the optimistic interpretations of the cases/mortality data we have been seeing.
If the proportion of positive _asymptomatic_ cases found by testing everyone
had been much higher, then we might have been much closer to getting
effective herd immunity without having ~1% of us die. No such luck.
What to do with an Amazon 401K?
I know to contribute 4% of compensation, because the company matching is 0.50 on the $ up to that and zero above. But the default is Vanguard 2050, and they charge you for the privilege of reallocating from a stock market index fund to bonds as you age. Best option for what to put it in? Just AMZN?
Default enrollment is also pre-tax. Switch to Roth?
Do they offer any funds other than Target 2050 and AMZN? If not I’d probably eat the fees and do the target fund. Roth vs pre-tax is very context dependent. Basically you want to do Roth if you anticipate withdrawing more per year in retirement than you’re earning now or if you anticipate the tax rate to be higher when you retire and begin withdrawing. Personally I do 50/50 just to feel like I’m covering my basis but there’s no way to really know if that’s optimal.
No, it’s super-flexible. You can manage your own 401K funds with a Fidelity account. I was just thinking that it doesn’t have to be balanced because at 4(or rather 6)% of a modest income every two weeks of work, it’s going to be a long time before it’s even half the funds in our non-401K Fidelity account, which is currently balanced at something like 24% bond ETF, 40% FXAIX (the S&P 500) and 36% 10 different dividend aristocrats.
For God’s sake don’t put it all into AMZN. I know a bit about Amazon compensation structures, and they’re heavily weighted towards Amazon stock anyway. The last thing you want is to expose yourself more to the vagaries of AMZN stock pricing.
The idiotproof option is figuring out what Vanguard’s target date fund works out to in terms of stocks/bonds (it’ll probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of 85/15 if you’re as old as I think you are) and rolling your own solution that approximates that but without the overhead. It won’t change fast enough to matter; just rebalance every few years. The slightly more complicated thing that I do with my own 401K is to find a low-cost index fund for value stocks and replace a big chunk of the “stocks” portion of my portfolio with that since I work for a growth company. It can get more or less arbitrarily complicated from there, but with diminishing returns.
Others have already given the advice I’d give about Roth vs. traditional, so I won’t repeat that.
i.e.
We live pretty frugally with no rent/mortgage, so I don’t anticipate having a strong desire to draw down a 401K more per unit of time after age 60 or 65 than earned working. So my only thinking with the Roth was that taxes will be higher in the US in the 2050s, but who the heck knows?
I put a decent amount of my savings in a regular, after-tax brokerage account.
Not only do I not trust that taxes won’t go higher, I don’t trust that the government won’t change the rules and claw-back whatever benefits a 401K supposedly offers.
Also, it’s now truly your money, free and clear, and you can access it in times of emergency without penalty.
Taxes are the bribe you pay for the state to renounce its claim to your money. Sometimes its worth it just to pay the bribe and move on.
VFIFX, the 2050 fund at vanguard charges 15 basis points internal expenses…that’s .0015, or about $150 dollars internal expense per $100,000 invested. Just eat the cost. You almost certainly have better ways to optimize your retirement savings than worrying about a few bips.
wrt Roth dollars: @Jake R has the jist of it. If you anticipate your effective tax rate will be higher in retirement than it is now, then focus on the Roth. You might be earning more income, or overall rates may be higher–the Roth is a hedge against that. If you think your rate will be lower, either by less income or an overall reduction in taxes (lol) then overweight the traditional 401(k).
Note that employer match + profit share always goes into the traditional/pretax side. I find it valuable to have diversity in tax status in accounts so that taxable income may be managed more closely. Many folks use a roth, traditional and after-tax brokerage, depending on their situation.
If you can spare the cash and are in a high tax bracket, contribute the IRS max to the conventional 401K, even if you don’t get matching.
Other than that: I will say only this. Conventional wisdom is to not invest in the company you work for, to sell any company stock you get immediately and invest it elsewhere, to diversify between stocks and bonds and such. I’m not going to recommend against any of that. I am going to say I’ve done the opposite for the past 10 years and done very well. And that includes even now; I’m way down from the highs but I’m a heck of a lot better off than if I’d followed that advice.
My UPS driver is delivering packages in a surgical mask.
Do you think that individual driver privately stockpiled, or does UPS have a stockpile and is issuing them to employees?
If the latter, does that imply that UPS was better prepared for this sort of eventuality than our government and/or medical system?
I dunno, but I would feel better if every home delivery driver were somehow provided with gloves, mask, and hand sanitizer.
My doordash driver earlier today had gloves, but no mask!
My groceries home delivery drivers have gloves and presumably hand sanitiser but no masks. They’re also practicing social distancing, e.g. will not come into the house but drop the goods on the doorstep or will come in but we both have to maintain the Official Social Distancing Distance.
Been told that it’s crazy busy, everyone staying at home is now ordering online and they’ve got a ton of new first-time users so delivery slots are booked solid a week in advance. There are definitely a lot of temporary jobs in retail to meet the demand for extra staff so swings and roundabouts for the economy.
I bet that in Northern California a lot of people have N95 masks left over from the fires a year ago, as there were dangerous amounts of smoke over a large area, and the message to use a respirator and not just a surgical-style mask got around pretty quickly. There were small shortages at the time, just stores getting bought out and needing to restock, I don’t think people were panic buying so badly, plus demand was a little more localized. There are plenty of professions (which could also be hobbies) where those masks are useful anyway, if I saw someone out in public with one on, I don’t think I’d assume they didn’t already have it before panic buying started.
I’ve been very confused by public perception of Cuomo lately.
East coasters started taking action in response to Covid around March 10th; that’s when Harvard and MIT announced they were kicking out their undergraduates, and the NBA postponed their season on the 11th. Many states and local school districts started preparing to move online, with the official move coming a few days later.
In the midst of this all, it seemed to me that New York was the most notable hold-out. DeBlasio was publicly resisting calls to close public schools, there were no steps taken to end dine-in restaurants or impose a curfew, and it didn’t seem like there was much pressure on offices in NYC to switch to work-from-home. And meanwhile, I was already hearing about hospitals in NYC being overrun.
After NYC finally closed schools, DeBlasio asked Cuomo to declare a shelter-in-place on March 17, and Cuomo basically said “no.” Two days later, Cuomo relented and declared one (but called it by a different name). After all of this, I had a strong perception that Cuomo and DeBlasio were idiots who tried to ignore the outbreak, and finally started taking it seriously once it was impossible to ignore. Predictably, NYC now accounts for nearly 10% of total cases worldwide (not just currently active cases!).
I recently moved in with my parents, who get their news from cable TV. And I was shocked to find out that public perception of Cuomo is of a competent leader and voice of reason during this outbreak. People are even writing articles about how Cuomo should be the democratic nominee instead of Biden or Sanders.
Is Cuomo just really good with the media and fooling everyone? Or am I getting this wrong? I can think of a few ways I could be wrong about this:
1) Really this is all DeBlasio’s fault and Cuomo has done nothing wrong. This is possible; Cuomo had already locked down New Rochelle, which is a good sign. But I had the sense that Cuomo had DeBlasio’s back regarding the actions in my second paragraph above. Also resisting a shelter-in-place that the NYC mayor asked for seems really dumb. Also also, it sounds like NYC hospitals were already overcrowded before literally any action was taken. If Cuomo were the competent leader everyone believes him to be, he ought to have already been taking action, not waiting for DeBlasio.
2) The rapid spread of Covid in NYC would have happened anyway, and isn’t really the fault of DeBlasio and Cuomo. I’m pretty sure this is false. I’m sure everyone here has seen the graph about the impact that starting social distancing a day early can make. And New York wasn’t just one or two days late, they were really, really late.
What do people think about this?
I don’t have any opinion on the object level, but historically it seems like a great way to become more popular as a state leader is to start a totally unnecessary war and get a lot of your subjects/citizens killed. So this just seems like the equivalent – leaders that prevent their cities (or whatever) from becoming hotspots of the epidemic miss out on the usual popularity bonus of presiding over (and, thus, visibly fighting) a disaster.
People mostly judge politicians and talking heads by whether what they’re saying right now agrees with popular perceptions/conventional wisdom right now. This is the mechanism by which, after the Iraq invasion and occupation turned out to be a lot harder and longer than the pundits predicted, the biggest Iraq war boosters remained the high-status, high-trust pundits. Being right too soon makes you look weird and out-of-step and off-message, even if later on it turns out you were right. Outside of Phil Tetlock, nobody much looks back to see how public officials’ or pundits’ statements turned out long-term.
So my guess is, Cuomo has been very visible (NYC has a massive concentration of media) and has been broadly in-step with the conventional wisdom and the consensus among the influential and powerful and among journalists. If he’d been out front a month ago pushing for some kind of aggressive response, I expect he’d have seemed weird and lost status, at least until everyone else came around, and maybe not even then.
Are there examples we can point to of public officials who were ahead of the curve in terms of taking decisive action? It might be useful to try to draw attention to the success stories as well as the failure stories.
Well, this little-known guy named Donald Trump put in travel restrictions in the USA before it was cool.
Seriously, it sounds like Ohio was on the ball from comments lower down, but I don’t know much about different responses out there.
Prediction: Mexico is probably badly unprepared for COVID-19, and El Salvador/Guatemala/Honduras/Et Al are completely unprepared and don’t have the resources to deal with it at all. I predict we’re going to see well-founded calls to make it much, much harder to come to the US from those places in the coming months. I expect this will become an active political issue–everyone knows Trump would like to massively decrease immigration from these countries anyway, but it will probably be the right policy to avoid massive additional inflow of infected people.
I don’t know how long it will be till we can get rapid testing (something done on-the-spot like rapid flu and strep tests), but that’s what you’d want for border crossings now. And perhaps for flights, as well. At the very least, temperature and symptom screenings.
The Trump travel restrictions don’t count, their execution was beyond botched by the usual administration incompetency with executing their policies, and may have actually made things worse.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/15/816065950/travelers-greeted-with-hours-long-airport-lines-as-coronavirus-screenings-begin
I was talking about the travel restrictions on China in January.
I agree Trump should’ve shut down the borders earlier and more aggressively. It’s a criticism I’ve made of him.
Save lives, lose status. What a trade-off!
Shinzo Abe?
Yup. No one seems to have lost their faith in the media even though those idiots only started taking the Coronavirus seriously as a reaction to Trump not doing so. I’ve pointed to specific examples of them downplaying it to people I know, and it doesn’t faze them.
It didn’t take a genius to see this coming. The Coronavirus was an epidemic in China in January and a contagious disease is obviously going to spread past its original outbreak location. And although we had over a month to prepare for this, only anonymous internet accounts realized this. No one expects much from Trump but what’s the media’s excuse?
In fairness, they also said that about SARS and MERS and Swine Flu and Bird Flu, and none of those things ended up being a very big deal in the western world.
Prior to this instance, taking a stance of “the media is overhyping this, diseases that are a big deal in China don’t become big deals here” had a 100% successful track record.
But we knew exactly what made this different from those. It had a relatively high death rate compared to swine flu and spread asymptomatically.
If it spreads asymptomatically, how do we know the death rate?
@gleamingecho
The death rate is what scientists call the “Case Fatality Rate”. The rate of fatalities who where confirmed to be infected by a laboratory.
Yes, those will not include “mild cases”, but the same is true for official numbers for other infections like the flu.
@Wrong Species
We only know that in retrospect. The death rate due to swine flu was initially believed to be very high. The epidemic made it to the United States, spread without control here… but turned out to be no worse than the regular flu.
@Wrong Species
In January and early February, it was not known with certainty that the disease spreads asymptomatically. I know, because our first case here in Germany was from a presumed asymptomatic carrier and was touted as evidence for asymptomatic transmission (although it turned out later that the woman was in fact symptomatic).
Although I agree with your larger point, since a reasonable confidence interval definitely should have included a larger pandemic than SARS.
Who is “we”?
The average person isn’t going to scihub and reading journal articles about R0. They just watch the news. And the news treated this pretty much the same way they treated those other things. So why should anyone blame them for assuming it would end up the same?
@Matt
I didn’t read journal articles or anything like that. I just read the news and followed forums from other non-experts who though this was something we should take seriously(which I started following after wondering why no one was taking this seriously).
But yeah, I don’t expect the average guy who barely watches the news to get it. But the media people should be spending their time on this instead of constantly updating Trump’s twitter account. They should be held accountable but they won’t. They’ll still be the major source of news in the country for years to come.
@Nybbler
China shut down their economy and the bodies were piling up. That should have been enough for people to perk up. I’m not saying that I knew it would be this bad from the beginning but there were influential people still saying “it’s just the flu” in mid February. The media cared more about people possibly being racist and mocked anyone concerned.
@Wrong Species
You are treating “the media” as some sort of public service, which is totally wrong. In fact, media companies are businesses responding to consumer demand. In January, there was relatively low demand for stories about virological situation in China, but there is always high demand for stories about Trump.
@AlesZiegler
I mean, on the one hand you’re entirely correct. On the other, they do claim to be a public service. One should at least attempt to be what one advertises.
@EchoChaos
Doesn´t almost every company claim that? I tend to take media claims of their social responsibility as seriously as any other Corporate SR statements. Which is NOT entirely discount them, since companies sometimes really do behave in socialy responsible ways even if it hurts their bottom line. But their statements should not be taken at face value.
Them more than most, maybe? After all, if we don’t vote the way WaPo tells us to then “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
@AlesZiegler
I’m fine with treating them as Trump tabloids. The problem is that other people don’t, and that has serious consequences.
1. I agree with your premise that this was predictable and I can’t understand why no one bothered to do anything about it January or February besides dither with bad tests. At a minimum, you’d expect them to have being working out specific plans for what to do if something like what we see now happened. I can see no evidence of even this basic level of contingency planning.
2. “The Media” is big and inconsistent with itself (so much as it is a single thing). You can find articles shouting that this is a huge deal and it’s crazy that we aren’t dealing with it, and you can find articles claiming it is nothing and everyone’s over-reacting.
3. I really do think some people in the media believed that if this was a real threat, the Federal government would be doing something about it. They took the Federal response as indicative that it really was no big deal. These aren’t experts but the EPs for the 24-hour networks and editors for the national papers.
4. Before March, there wasn’t a clear mapping from SARS-Cov-2 onto the right/left political spectrum. This made it harder for popular media to talk about, since they weren’t sure how to frame it for their audience. That makes it a lower priority programming-wise.
In normal circumstances, the fact that the government was downplaying the issue *would* be evidence that it wasn’t serious.
Apparently, Trump was receiving and ignoring frequent intelligence briefings on the epidemic starting in January.
Boy who cried wolf. We’ve relatively recently had scares about SARS, MERS, H1N1 “swine flu”, and H5N1 “bird flu”, and none of them amounted to much; SARS and MERS burnt out, “swine flu” turned out to be no worse than the usual flu, and H5N1 also hasn’t amounted to much.
@Loriot
Huh? Trump took action to contain it in January substantial enough that the press criticized him for it, so “Trump ignored it” sounds implausible to me.
The rest of the West is in the same boat or worse than the USA, so the idea that we uniquely screwed up seems unlikely.
Larry Hogan in Maryland has taken this significantly more seriously than Cuomo pretty much from the start, and acted accordingly. Not sure how much attention he is getting nationally but I live in a very blue area of Maryland, Hogan is a Republican, and I have not met a single Democrat (including myself) who doesn’t think he is doing a fantastic job handling this.
Particularly notably, Ben Jealous, the Democrat he beat for the job in the last election, went on CNN the other day and said Hogan was doing a great job managing the crisis.
That is notable—he defied nominative determinism!
Envy is wanting what others have. Jealousy is wanting to keep what you have. I’m sure I beat someone else to saying this by only a few seconds.
Either way, not a great name for a politician.
I find the DMV area’s challenge responding to this fascinating. You have basically one huge metro area under three very different jurisdictions (politically). The decisions of one effect the other, but the governors from MA and VA have lots of other constituents living in very different locations/conditions.
It’s all quite a tangle. If they can navigate this effectively, I’ll be quite impressed.
Pretty sure you mean MD, as Massachusetts and Virginia don’t share a border. 🙂
So far the DC area response seems to be well handled on all sides, but it may be early to tell.
DMV? Do you mean DC? Or is that an acronym for the DC metro area I’ve just never heard? ETA: Oh, does it stand for DC-Maryland-Virginia?
Ah, I was wondering why he was talking about the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The more I think about it, the more I think a big reason is that Cuomo has been aggressively bipartisan with his response.
He has studiously avoided throwing shade at anyone and emphasized the “We’re all Americans, we’re all New Yorkers, let’s beat this” part of the message. I think America is pretty thirsty for this kind of attitude, so anyone who is projecting it well, regardless of competence, is going to get buoyed by that.
Agree.
Of all the big-name Democratic politicians, the most noticeable thing about Cuomo is that he has been the nicest to Trump, and therefore Trump has been the nicest to him.
Which makes him look really good to anyone who doesn’t hate Trump with the passion of ten burning suns.
…and not so good to the people (necessary for winning the Democratic nomination) who *do* hate Trump.
Good thing candidates for Vice President don’t have to win primaries.
If only Cuomo was a woman.
I thought I read recently that Cuomo said he wouldn’t allow judges to marry people because of the many judges that were chosen by Trump. Was this a bogus claim, or does Cuomo reserve his bi-partisanship to just Covid-19?
I was also wondering this. I think several people here made good points.
Definitely think this is part of it, and I don’t think it is as crazy as it initially sounds. People are attracted to concrete examples of leadership when it is really needed: the kind of leadership that is hard to fake, on issues that are hard to fake or steal credit for. We evolved for a world in which leadership involves clear action and obvious stakes, and a lot of alleged leadership/courage/competence we see now is performative or suspect by comparison. There’s really no way to fix this to give the necessary credit to people who averted catastrophes instead of actively managed them, even where the former does way more good, because we never know what would have happened. It’s really frustrating and at times absurd, because people get rewarded for managing problems they created, which gets exploited, and many heroes are shunned or forgotten. But I do think it must be accepted that we are primed to bond with the people we see visibly fighting something that threatens us, if they seem in earnest. Earlier miscalculations just fade from mind. I think the dominance of television news is also an immensely exacerbating factor in so much of this. People who get concentrated coverage have the opportunity to develop that bond of familiarity (which people argue helped Trump and Reagan quite a bit), and having a personality that plays well on television becomes a deciding factor. Being good on TV sometimes correlates with having a commanding presence in general, but there are a lot of strong leadership styles that don’t come across on television. What these styles are can change. Blunt New Yorkers seem to be doing particularly well in today’s televisual news environment, in terms of getting themselves heard, probably in part because the style looks very active.
Definitely agree with this. People just totally reinterpret reality based on how comfortable it makes them feel at the moment, which often correlates to a preferred worldview. I find this rapid seesawing is especially true in audiences who like to watch cable news (it bugs me when people act like following current events that way is an inevitable modern requirement and not a meaningful preference–it’s very popular, but most people watch network news or browse online, and I find it physically uncomfortable to watch a lot of video or be exposed to a lot of emotional dialogue). People who like cable news on as their background noise are also sensitive to emotional dialogue/tone, but not in the aversive sense–it resonates with them, makes things real and invigorating. It makes things stick out as important in the stream of coverage, and they just don’t notice the less-vivid inconsistencies. The same position will get a radically different response and go from absurd to conventional wisdom overnight. That clearly happened with the pandemic on a lot of levels, not just with Cuomo. Many probably just don’t remember that he pushed back against a lockdown a few days ago, because it didn’t get as much coverage with as much intensity. (Also, a fair number of people like to focus on the present and don’t focus a ton on consistency and foresight. A lot of them weren’t paying attention or changed their minds pretty recently, and don’t blame him for doing so, as long as he has the right attitude now. I’m guessing this group is less likely to get caught up in a sudden desire to make him a saintly hero who will fix the nation).
It’s funny, because all the headlines I’ve seen seems to be portraying Cuomo as at war with Trump, telling Trump off. I knew this was anti-Trump framing, but even though it gave me the impression he was more combative than most, it didn’t come across as partisan combat. But it didn’t seem bipartisan so much as “we’re way past partisan concerns here.” I definitely think that is an attitude a lot of people appreciate, and his blunt style even satisfies those who worry about going too easy on Trump.
New York media pays attention to New York politicians. Cuomo, Giuliani, Bloomberg, Trump.
Oooh, a chance to ACKTUALLY in real life!
Trump is technically from Florida now. 🙂
Silly EchoChaos. AKSHUALLY, SSC is not real life.
The last thread has two comments:
1. One an account of a man who couldn’t afford 500$ for corona testing.
2. Another a worry about the economy after corona due to people saving up money:
Hey, thanks for linking to my comment (the first one).
I’m not sure if you think the comments are complementary or contradictory, but I think both could be accurate reflections. They are just different socio-economic brackets with different behaviors.
The low-income people who are scraping by with backyard chickens and no health insurance will continue to do so (if they don’t get sick, unable to work or homeless), and the middle-class may decide to finally have an emergency fund like all the finance bloggers say they should. I’m no economist, but the savings shouldn’t be a problem because the saved money will be used for reinvestment, either in the stock market or by the bank issuing more loans to recovering businesses. Same as it ever was.
1. Saving is not a problem for the economy.
2. 2 months of this is not going to scare the crap out of people. The federal government is (eventually) going to pass a bill where UE payments can reach an annual rate of >$30,000 a year, plus a notable cash payout, and lots of provisions for cheap loans, debt forgiveness and getting to avoid rent/utilities. If single this gets resolved in 2 months the single people under 30 are going to have it reinforced that the government will step in and save their buts if anything major happens. They won’t exactly be wrong to think that seeing as something that scared the crap out of the two generations above them turned into a 2 month staycation at 75% pay
Total agreement, the US government is going to bail out everyone again, and going through a ton of effort to make this as painless as possible. There’s a national health crisis, but don’t worry, you can still get take-out food.
Here’s my random/probably somewhat dumb question- if we all know about low cost index funds- what exactly do financial advisors do for their clients? I mean, I get the basics- some tax planning, talking about the benefits of a Roth IRA vs. some other plan, budgeting help, etc. I have met with a fee-only, fiduciary financial advisor myself, just to go over these things.
But the advisors who actually manage people’s money- what value add do they bring above simply investing in the S&P 500 Index Fund? I’ve heard that the more connected ones can get you into private equity or venture capital funds, so that’s a plus. But other than that…..? What do they do?
Make you feel like a big shot rich person who has a fancy financial advisor picking stocks for them?
To play devil’s advocate/steel-man an industry that I have serious problems with:
Depending on your tax bracket, it can be beneficial to outsource your investing to a wealth management group like at GS or JPM. Not everyone is going to sit down and calculate the optimal mix of bonds, ETFs/whatever, and tax free bonds to ensure the optimal risk adjusted after tax return. Plus they will rebalance. How many of us actually rebalance consistently? I don’t.
Really the question is whether the
Theft…fees…are worth it on net for an individual. If the alternative for said individual is “place it all in [random well known firm]” then it might net positive?In my personal experience, all financial advisors only brought negative value. This experience was similar for all people I know in person who have discussed this topic with me.
I suppose that, technically, the advantage of financial advisors is the convenience of how they make your money go away. Instead of doing market research for yourself and then losing all your money, you can simply lose it by following their instructions.
As a bonus, they give you someone other than yourself to blame after you lose all your money.
hey, if you have enough money, that can be a real timesaver!
I feel personally attacked! Kidding, kidding. I’m a fee based, not only, advisor, and many of the items you mentioned are a big part of the job: the “education” piece. We do have access to private investments that you don’t, but these generally aren’t applicable for most upper-middle or upper class investors. You’ll see the more sexy/exotic investments with your big guys like JPM and GS, but we’re talking about $30mm+ relationships there. More generational/family wealth.
A few thoughts:
1. Understand the the SSC commentariat is vastly more informed and educated than your average investor. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve explained yield vs price to millionaires. There are a lot of individuals who have success with their businesses, that don’t grok capital markets.
2. As @Gossage Vardebedian noted below, lots of people don’t have the risk tolerance to invest for themselves appropriately. Millennials are the worst about this, typically, as their overall risk tolerance has been smacked around by ’08. If Tom and Julie are 35, but can’t stomach more than a 5% annual swing in their account balances, they’re going to need to save like mad in order to keep up with inflation. Or they can use an appropriate asset allocation for their age, and take 2 extra vacations a year and let compound interest work. You would be surprised at how my advanced degree holders require this service.
3. Until your situation reaches a level of complexity, you really, really don’t need me. If you’re still saving, I can’t do much above the S&P on a risk adjusted basis, and certainly not regularly. But what do you do when you inherit a $2mm property with a $300k basis that’s already stepped up once? These are the type of questions that we can answer, and answer immediately without having to google and piece together information. If I can save you $200k on taxes in that situation, that’s a pretty massive ROI.
I love cars, so I think of it like this: if you know how to change your brakes and oil, you can handle maybe 80% of issues that a car might present. But, you don’t have the tools or knowledge to rebuild an auto transmission. So you call someone who does.
My father’s retirement savings were in three pieces: about one third in stock in the company he retired from, one third in a target date fund, one third in certificates of deposit/savings accounts. He also had a handful of tiny investments where the biggest risk was him forgetting about them/losing passwords. I couldn’t persuade him that any of this was a problem and should be changed – that is, he’d agree with me and then wouldn’t do anything.
Within a year of him signing up with a financial advisor, he was well diversified, and all the investments are noted in an organized well-tracked manner. This has included almost as much psychology/framing as actual advice. For example, the trick to getting him out of the single stock turned out to be introducing him to limit orders. That meant that rather than staying in the stock out of fear of picking the wrong time, he felt he was in control of the decision to divest.
He’s also been introduced to some different asset classes than stocks and bonds, such as REITs, which may be helping him get better results – too early to tell.
That one shift from a bad allocation to a good one likely pays for the advisor’s fees from now til the end. Knowing my dad, it’s probably equally important that he have regular meetings where he can be talked out of going back to the old strategy. Theoretically there wasn’t any special benefit from getting that advice from a certified professional – but in reality that made the difference.
So from my perspective, it’s kind of a similar question as ‘is there any value in a personal trainer?’. Theoretically you can get all the information you need from the internet, but in practice it helps to have the external motivator and the external third party who can neutrally point out when you’re doing something wrong.
I’m pretty sure some people in the U.S. Congress are going to die from COVID-19. What happens then? Will the rest of them start calling for more drastic action to stop it?
I’m not so sure. So far, the mortality rate among the rich and famous seems to be pretty darn low. Near-zero, as far as I can tell. Among the various athletes, actors, and politicians who are increasingly announcing they have it – most seem to be doing quite fine.
I’m pretty confident that such people have basically zero risk of being denied a ventilator, regardless of how “overwhelmed” the medical system becomes, and regardless of how the system is setup in one particular country vs another or whether the payer is public, private, etc.
But do you know the proportion of those who end up on a ventilator, die anyway?
50%? 75% ?
Most of the 20,000 deaths have occurred in places where the health systems have not been overwhelmed, so I’d guess that the ventilators for those people were merely what accompanied their last days or hours.
A while ago I read some stats that about 5% of people with a covid diagnosis need ICU treatment. About half of them die.
Now ICU doesn’t automatically mean ventilator, but your 50% is probably the right ballpark.
But I do think most of the deaths have been in areas where the health system was overwhelmed, like Wuhan, northern Italy and Iran. Countries and areas with smallish case numbers have much lower death rates, although that might just mean they’re testing more people with mild symptoms.
World-renowned chef Floyd Cardoz died Wednesday in New Jersey at age 59. Cardoz had tested positive for coronavirus.
Once you’re on a ventilator for Covid-19, you face a very high risk of death no matter the age (I even saw doctors estimate it as 50% no matter the age, which is probably an exaggeration).
If it comes to politicians, especially the US president or vice-president, I believe their doctors would be able to acquire and use antibodies from recovered patients to ameliorate COVID-19.
Other politicians, maybe.
Regular rich people, possibly.
Regular people, unusually.
The Prince of Wales has caught COVID-19. We’ll see how expedited his treatment is in the UK.
Neither his case nor Prince Albert of Monaco’s appear to be particularly serious in the first place.
That’s callously optimistic. We should at least make periodic concerned calls asking if they still have Prince Albert (in a can).
If we had more sophisticated driverless delivery trucks and/or drone delivery, what impact would that have on this outbreak?
Pizza delivery, in my very recent experience, still involves a gloveless person handing me a receipt and a pen and me handing them back. Getting rid of that would help.
You don’t want to give the pen back?
I could use my own pen instead, but they’d still want the receipt back after I sign it.
Domino’s will drop the pizza off at your doorstep and step back >6 feet while you pick it up. No receipt signing necessary. (I tipped when I ordered online.)
I’m sure this was discussed before, but now fresh numbers are in…why is the death toll in Italy so high?
Even if we assume china’s number’s are wrong, we now have enough countries that have gone through this to know that Italy’s rate of cases-to-deaths is weirdly high. It’s especially interesting because the next highest rate is by my reckoning Iran. Perhaps different explanations are at play there.
The best explaination I’ve heard is some kind of perfect storm confluence of: Older population, drinking, smoking, and a messed-up medical system…but what else can it be? Also, why isn’t this a bigger part of the narrative. It feels like something that so obviously impacts mortality would be discussed more.
EDIT: Thought it was worth listing explanations I’ve heard that I think are unsatisfactory: Age (alone), Smoking (alone), Who gets tested and therefore becomes a case, Large numbers of misdiagnosed cases, Specific vector of disease among italians
Higher exposure levels due to greater acceptance of close physical contact? AFAIK, A small exposure is more likely to result in a recovery than a large exposure, as a small exposure gives the immune system more time to respond.
Not to diminish your point but Italy has some of the lowest alcohol consumption in Europe. And China’s smoking rate is higher than Italy’s.
No no,this is exactly why I’m posting it, because I’ve been making the same arguments.
I lived in China for a while, and while I realize that I only met a very specific segment of the population, my read on the Chinese population is that they are HEAVY smokers generally.
It’s either some weird multifactor combination or..I dunno…
Per wikipedia: China is #15 globally in tobacco consumption per capita, while Germany is #33.
There’s an interesting wrinkle with China and tobacco: It’s overwhelmingly men who smoke. This could distort the general correlation between tobacco consumption and COVID-19 deaths, though the relationship is complex enough that I’m not sure I would even attempt to predict the direction.
Men in China were also almost twice as likely as women to die, so maybe cigarettes are partially to blame for that.
When I was in college, ~100% of the people I saw smoking outside were Chinese men, so this tracks my experience.
Overwhelmed medical system, I’ve seen claims by a doctor there that they are no longer using life saving equipment (I assume ventilators) on patients over 60.
Counterpoint: I’ve been watching these numbers for several weeks and it’s consistently been the same: 10% of “new cases” become deaths. Wouldn’t the the rate of cases/deaths be increasing if this were true?
I don’t know.
Regardless, an overwhelmed medical system should lead to a higher death rate, there is an overwhelmed medical system and a higher death rate.
There may be something else, but I think this is a large part of why it’s so bad there
Italy being in lockdown for a while (slower increase in new actual cases), increased testing capacity, increased medical capacity could explain a constant 10% death rate. But tbh, I would be surprised if this were actually the case, does anybody have a source where we can see death rate over time?
I’ve been using this data source.
Using the first death as the starting point, it looks like the death rate started out around 2-3% for the first two weeks, and has gone up 1% every 3-4 days since then.
Im not certain, but i have heard italy reports death causes differently
@meh
I think yours is the best answer. If you have the virus in Italy and you die, the virus killed you. The other extreme is Germany – if you had anything else wrong with you when you died, it was the anything else that killed you.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120443722/coronavirus-is-covid19-really-the-cause-of-all-the-fatalities-in-italy
If it were the case that most people in Italy marked as dead from coronavirus would have died anyway, then wouldn’t we not be seeing this crisis? Like we wouldn’t have this video if only 12 percent were dying “because” of the coronavirus: https://www.insider.com/coronavirus-video-shows-italian-newspapers-filling-up-with-obituaries-2020-3
These people most be ones that would not have died otherwise. Merely the fact that they have a comorbidity isn’t surprising – most people have a comorbidity (smoking or high blood pressure or asthma or diabetes). Or am I missing something?
Saying that 88% had a co-morbidity is far, far from saying that 88% died of something else besides COVID-19. Almost certainly nearly 100% of these people died of COVID-19. But maybe a high % would have died from something else in the next year or 5 years, which is quite a different thing.
but what are other countries reporting? do they report the 12 or the 88?
The 12 and the 88 – the Italy and Germany of numbers
If Germany is reporting the extreme low end and Italy the extreme high end, then what is everyone else reporting?
They’re also counting “comorbidities” such as diabetes or high blood pressure which people without COVID could have lived with for several decades longer.
Comorbidities also make you more likely to die in a car accident.
Doesn’t mean you didn’t die in a car accident.
@matt:
Yeah but the comorbidities here seem to play a much larger role in the fatality rate. I guess what I’m trying to say is that driving with diabetes isn’t that much different than driving without diabetes, while being infected with the 2019 coronavirus with diabetes is a much different animal than being infected without diabetes.
I’m not sure what conclusion to draw here–just pointing out what I perceive is a difference in the two scenarios.
This is very likely wrong, as has been pointed out many times. Germany also records covid-19 deaths if they test patients posthumously and find they were infected.
I can’t speak for Italy but for Hamburg Germany. We now have one official death from covid-19. A 52 year old died at home in self quarantine. Why he wasn’t admitted to a hospital is unknown. Last week an older person died with tested corona infection in a hospital but was not reported as a corona death because of other comorbidities.
The medical system is far from being overwhelmed as there are currently only 19 people in ICUs with covid-19 in a city of 2 million (source: local press). As the number of death is really low in Germany I assume that the other states in Germany follow comparably strict rules of classification.
@raw
Thanks for the info regarding the earlier case, it seems I was overconfident.
An official reply of the rki shows that the guidelines seem to be “classify a death as covid-19 related if it’s *possible* that it was caused by covid-19. Also count it as covid-19 related, if one of the conditions that lead to earlier death was caused by covid-19.” https://fragdenstaat.de/anfrage/covid-19-todesfalldefinition/
Some research shows that the mentioned older person died after he fell down. Depending on the circumstances, this is fairly compatible with the guideline. It also might have been classified as non-covid related in Italy, as the above link only says that “if you die in the hospital and have covid-19, you are classified as a covid-19 death”. I remain unconvinced that there will anything but a miniscule difference due to these reporting differences.
Do you have a source for this? I feel like I’ve been following everything pretty closely and this is the first I’ve heard that.
see reply to anteros
This source only specifies how Italy records the death causes, but does not claim that Germany does it differently.
no it doesnt make that specific comparison, but it does imply italy has a policy that is different from most places. im not an expert, if you have more information, please share
@meh: I think “most places” have the same policy as Italy, given that their number of active cases exactly equals their number of total cases minus recoveries minus deaths. That wouldn’t be possible people who died in a car crash or whatever while infected with COVID were not counted among deaths.
Someone, I think on SSC, posted some data on the Italian case and a conjecture. The data showed a very high proportion of the dead were also suffering from one or more other serious diseases. The conjecture was that the virus spread largely through the health care system, so the victims were people already in that system, hence, on average, old and sick.
I think this conjecture added to the Italian way of interpreting causes of death seems to explain the Italian figures quite convincingly. Add in an aging population and the figures no longer seem surprising.
It´s basically like flu in Italy.
https://mobile.twitter.com/serguht/status/1242952415877500928
Only, it may be not because your guy on twitter a) compares apples to oranges (case fatality deaths to estimated “excess deaths”). b) makes an prediction w/o giving reasons for the prediction, and than treats it as fact.
Well, we will know soon enough.
Sorry, that I go full “Someone is wrong on the Internet”-mode here, but no we will not.
After I have slept let me explain to you how wrong this guy is.
1) The case fatality rate, is the rate of people who die, because of the sickness, and are cases proofen by an laboratory. Estimated exess deaths are the number of deaths, in excess of the average, in a population in a given time after adjusting for known cofunders. Necessarily the second number will always be higher then the first. It’s like comparing the death of two wars, where for the first war you only have battle reports, and for the other war yo have battle reports, campt deaths, and excess deaths in the affected civilian population, and than make a conclution which of the wars were more blody. Also excess deaths only can be calculated several months after the fact, and might be hard to calculate this time around, since the lock down shut down, should also lower deaths by other causes.
2) Speaking of shut down. Even if he would compare the same two numbers (which again he is not) the flu is allowed to run it’s course, while Covid-19 triggered the harshes public health response in modern history. If we expect the quarantines to have any effect at all, we must conclude that it would have been worse with out it.
3) Flu season in Europe is usually from late October to early April. Covid-19 reached Italy only in late January. If it kills about as much people, it did so in half the time influenza needs.
Bullshit. The flu doesn’t make hospitals run out of ICUs, and it doesn’t make the weekly total mortality in Bergamo go up by a fucking order of magnitude compared to last year.
Saying something vehemently doesn’t make it any more true; past flu outbreaks (not just 1918) have indeed made hospitals run out of ICU beds.
@The Nybbler
Yes but the last 4 flu seasons (referenced in the study linked in the linked twitter thread) did very much not.
Well, not necessarily that serious — the numbers everybody is quoting also count stuff such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or obesity. (And it’d be ridiculous to count a diabetic who dies in a car crash as having died of diabetes — why should a diabetic who dies of viral pneumonia be treated any differently?)
And it’d be ridiculous to count a diabetic who dies in a car crash as having died of diabetes — why should a diabetic who dies of viral pneumonia be treated any differently?
Suppose our diabetic died in the car crash because (a) a drunken driver, or simply someone who ran a red light, crashed into them or (b) they suffered a hypo, blacked out, and crashed.
In both (a) and (b) the immediate cause of death was the fatal crash, but in (b) the diabetes was the main contributory/causative factor in a way that it was not in (a).
Diabetes, whether Type I or Type II, has an effect on your overall health. This includes being more prone to infections, having a tougher time shaking them off, slower wound healing, tendency to ulcerations, as well as the fun stuff like the long-term complications of diabetes, see a selection below:
So you’ve got a severe enough case of the particular coronavirus that it encourages an opportunistic infection like viral pneumonia which is bad enough on its own, but layer all that on top of the problems in general with your health from having diabetes and in particular that diabetics even in ‘ordinary’ cases have worse outcomes when it comes to pulmonary diseases, and you’ve got a good enough reason to say that a diabetic who contracts COVID-19 is probably more likely to die of pneumonia than a non-diabetic, hence the diabetes is a strong contributory factor to the death.
Yeah, this is like saying leaving your door open at night isn’t a big deal. It isn’t, until someone comes in and steals your valuables.
Yeah, but you usually do not suddenly die from stuff like that, at least not in an first world country.
Higher percentage of extended-family households?
According to this map, it’s slightly higher compared to North-Western Europe, but similar or lower than Southern and Eastern Europe and North America, and way lower compared to non-Western countries.
This is a different metric! Extended family also refers to grandparents living with the nuclear family, and this is *very* much the case in Southern Europe, compared to Northern Europe, and is a big part of the explanation for the high death rate that you also see in Spain.
If you follow Kevin Drum, the charts he has been putting out show that other EU countries are basically on the same curve Italy was on. They [Italy] just had a big head start.
He also points out that the more severe measures in Italy seem to be making a difference in bending the curve of deaths per day.
As for my own $0.02, to the extent that other countries manage to stay underneath Italy’s curve, it will be partially because they were able to react more quickly because Italy showed them the future of milder action.
Spain looks worse. Switzerland looks better. Germany looks too early to tell.
This was my main point. The basic answer to “why does Italy look bad and everyone else looks OK” is that everyone else does NOT look OK. They look a lot like Italy did at the same stage in the progression.
Spain looks really, really bad when mapped on the comparative timeline as Italy, rather than looking better than Italy. Everyone else looks like you still don’t quite know. Maybe Switzerland is better at following directions than other countries (answer: Based on my experience, that is their culture. Their trains left precisely on the second when I was there). But, maybe they are still just early on.
I’ll also point out that looking at the US as a monolithic entity is wrong in the same way that looking at EU as a monolithic entity is wrong. If you compared the EU trends for the period that as panic inducing in Italy, it would obviously lag way behind the solo Italian curve. Most people tend to stay local most of the time, even with movement freedom. Thus the curve for “the US” would be expected to look artificially lower early in the outbreak. Whereas if you calculated these curves state by state, I would expect them to more closely resemble the Italian curve.
I’m still trying to figure out why countries are on different parts of the “progression” from one another. Surely the US had as many flights to and from Wuhan as Italy did during the relevant time period. Why didn’t the US cases start going up when Italy’s did?
From what I remember, the Italy outbreak came from a German business traveller. There is a lot of randomness in where you happen to get super-spreaders.
Welcome to the wonder of probability and statistics.
If you don’t see “clusters” in a random distribution, you probably don’t have a random distribution. After enough time, everything evens out, but early on, the question might simply be “Did you happen to get travelers from China, and did they happen to be infected? Did they contact a lot of people locally while infectious?”
Italy is just “lucky” to have been the first place that got community spread outside of Asia.
No they don’t. Germany has 37323 confirmed cases, with a mortality rate of 0.55%. Italy had a mortality rate of 8.3% when it had this many cases, if we count the confirmed cases of course.
The law of large numbers depends on the numbers being large. Below a certain number of infected things are very unpredictable and you can’t really count on a certain progression rate or anything like this. But as it grows, it gets more and more predictable to the point it gathers even pretty large moment – you can’t deflect it unless with great effort.
Sorry, but those charts make no sense. A month ago (25.02), there were 14 cases in France, 1 in Switzterland, 6 in Spain, and 18 in Germany.
Today, there are 25.2k cases in France, 10.8k in Switzerland, 47.6k in Spain, and 37.3 in Germany. Only Switzerland has less deaths (easy with an 1/10 of the population) So worst case, those charts tell us, that people in Germany started dying later than everywhere else.
Best case (as in less people dying) this charts tell us, that less people die in Germany, because why else would we be trailing in deaths, while not trailing in cases?
Maybe Germany is younger and healthier.
Germany actually has the highest median age in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age
Nope Top 4 in the World are literally in that order:
Monaco, Japan, Germany, Italy.
Raises the question if Monaco was a secret axis member, dosen’t it?
Hmm, not healthier either, it would appear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_risk_of_death_from_non-communicable_disease
As I stated below,we can explain all of this by simply positing that Germany did more testing earlier (which they have), so they captured more of the early growth. They look like they are farther along than they are in terms of community growth.
But the charts Drum is producing here are of deaths. Those are harder to detect early, so their curve looks just like Italy’s.
Germany has more ICU beds than Italy–maybe that’s a factor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_beds
Germany: ~24,280 ICU beds
Italy: ~7,540 ICU beds
[USA: ~114,500 ICU beds]
EDIT: Also, Germany has 5x as many ventilators as Italy, if the wiki is to be believed.
@DarkTigger:
He’s been doing a daily look at these numbers and hasn’t reexplained what he is doing in each post.
Here is the post where he switched from tracking the progression of diagnosed cases to tracking diagnosed deaths. He gives more explanation of the charts themselves there.
As a short explanation for why he switched from cases to deaths:
How many cases you reports is an intrinsically less dependable number than how many deaths there are. As a reductio, the number of detected cases in Wuhan province was obviously zero for quite a long time before they actually reported the first case. Of course there are issues with the reporting of deaths also, but we can only work with the data we have.
Please note that these charts are per capita numbers, not absolute, and that they also do not track numbers of deaths, but rather growth in the number of deaths.
The simplest explanation is that the case numbers are all wrong. We know they’ve been absurdly low from the start (17 official cases when their first patient died — probably an underestimate by 100-1000x), and it’s not surprising if their priority is to treat patients and build morgues now, rather than identify the remaining two million cases they likely have.
Yes, exactly.
Italians are more likely to live in extended families than people in Germanic-speaking countries. But by that logic, China could have been hit just as hard, and as for India…
I’d say it’s a contributing factor combined with being more physically demonstrative, an older age pyramid, smoking (this is a big one if COVID hammers your lungs!) and an unprepared National Health Service. Chinese are the world’s #15 smokers per capita (also see the gender skew mentioned here) and I don’t know anything about their health care system.*
*Except that it’s socialized with Chinese characteristics.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Italy are highly concentrated in the Lombardy region: Lombardy has 17% of the population of Italy, 43% of the confirmed cases and 60% of the deaths.
The high reported CFR is probably due to the health care system in Lombardy being severely overwhelmed, which results both in underdiagnosis (testing is reserved only to hospitalized patients with severe symptoms, and probably not even all of them) and preventable deaths due to the lack of ventilators and other ICU equipment.
The real question is why Lombardy was infected so thoroughly and so early compared to the rest of Italy and Europe. Could it be air pollution? According to these maps Northen Italy has (or had) unusually high air pollution compared to most of Europe
The real question is why Lombardy was infected so thoroughly and so early compared to the rest of Italy and Europe.
Capital of Lombardy is Milan, renowned for the rag trade. I’ve heard theorising that it got hit hard because there are so many Chinese (citation needed) working in the fashion/fabrics/garment industries as cheap plentiful labour and when they all came back from visting the Old Country for the New Year’s Festival they brought the virus with them.
I suppose it’s as plausible (or not) as any other theory?
Seems plausible, according to Wikipedia, Milan has the highest number of Chinese residents of all Italian cities (although per capita Chinese people tend to concentrate in a few cities in Tuscany, which has comparatively few cases of COVID-19, but I guess that total numbers are more important since in the early phases the infection spread exponentially).
However, Italy has less Chinese people than France, the UK or Russia (still according to Wikipedia, which however doesn’t distinguish well between Chinese expatriates and national-born people of Chinese ethnicity. I don’t know if a second-generation ethnic Chinese is as likely as a first-generation immigrant to fly to Wuhan to visit grandma for Lunar New Year).
It doesn’t seem too plausible to me. It looks like Milan’s Asian population is a bit over 1% of the total, whereas California is 15%. San Francisco is almost a third. It this were really the reason, I would expect the epicenter of the West to be here.
Bad luck and bad handling seem like more likely culprits.
My gut feeling is 90% of the California Chinese are ABCs and did not visit their distant relatives in china.
I would be suprised if the fist generation chinese were more than 5% of the general (California) population
I’m sure it was more than 90% that didn’t go, but I would also bet money that it was more people than went from Milan. I personally know at least three people that were in China between November and January this year, and only one of them was born there.
I couldn’t find the numbers for all of California, but the Bay Area is around 5% Chinese born.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/chinese-immigrants-united-states
From what I’ve read (the below linked article) this isn’t about Chinese contact per se, but more about Wuhan/Hubei contact in particular.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/international/covid-19-did-you-know-about-italys-china-connection/videoshow/74694266.cms
I’ve read some articles stating that the Lombardy virus is genetically similar to the earliest 14 German cases, implying that some infected people in Germany escaped detection and brought it to Italy, where it first spread to old and frail people.
I’ve also read that the first known case in Italy had not traveled recently, and must have caught the virus from someone in Europe. Of course, that unknown person may have been a traveler from China.
I don’t have the articles at hand any more, and they may be outdated. But just directly blaming the virus on Chinese immigrants is not the only plausible explanation, nor the one that has the most evidence.
https://nextstrain.org/ncov has the genetic maps that were used to trace who-infected-whom. There’s a crazy lot of information and I’m not sure I’m interpreting it correctly.
@Edward Scizorhands
I can’t begin to interpret the data on the nextstrain site, but at least I found a source for the “virus came to Italy from Munich” claim:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/mutations-can-reveal-how-coronavirus-moves-they-re-easy-overinterpret
Apparently this finding is becoming less likely as more data have emerged.
This makes me wonder about different strains circulating in different areas.
Is it too soon to refer to New York City as Little Italy?
The actual NYC Little Italy has basically been overrun by Chinatown, except about half a block kept around for tourists. So, more apt than you might think.
The mortality rate so far in New York is under 1%, but in Italy it’s about 10%. I think it’s too soon to start drawing any real comparisons.
Job hunt question time!
What job titles are coded to a significant extent for “fucks around in Excel all day”? I would like to fuck around in Excel all day more, and the closest I’ve got currently is “Executive Assistant” which includes fucking around in Excel all day but also includes ill-defined job responsibilities and working for generally hyper-busy people who don’t like to disambiguate.
Pretty much anything with “analyst” in the title, right?
Definitely looking into it. What I’ve seen so far indicates I might be a bit hamstrung by nearly-done-degree not being completely done, but worth a shot.
This is the right answer.
Depending on where you’re looking “Operations Researcher” could also qualify, although they’re more often coded as “Operations Research Systems Analyst”.
“Data Scientist” (mentioned below) is currently used so broadly (both by seekers and employers) as to be equivalent to “Do things with computers, occasionally involving numbers or charts.” If you can successfully bill yourself as a Data Scientist, I’d recommend you do that, though be careful that your direct report has some idea what they’re doing. Otherwise you’ll be given outrageous requests and may not have the experience/clout to say, “Your question can’t be answered with the data you have”.
If you like fucking around in Excel, I’d strongly recommend learning R or Python. It’s much more powerful, can be equally fun/frustrating, and while a lot of people will still want you to do things in Excel, it can give you a leg up in the hiring process.
+1 to all of this. SQL is also dead simple to learn and useful/expected if you’re doing anything with databases.
Matt M’s suggestion is solid.
If you’re willing to fuck around with SQL a bit as well, I’d also at least check out job titles like “data scientist”, but that will be more hit-and-miss. Based on a recent job search (within the past year), some companies’ data scientists are still mostly Excel/SQL monkeys, but others’ are decidedly not.
This reminds me of a funny anecdote from work. Apparently there are many managers who use excel spreadsheets for data analysis. Someone had the bright idea of teaching them how to write SQL queries. It went nowhere, as they refused to learn even the most basic “SELECT X From Y where conditions…”, saying it was “code” and they weren’t trained to “code.” Instead, they’d download the whole database into excel and then sort excel rows, often tens of thousands, to do in five minutes what could be done in thirty seconds with a SQL query.
I don’t think people are entitled to answer that way, since it’s not like many of them have ever even tried. But while there’s nothing difficult about SQL per se, reporting queries can get really gnarly. For example, for a long time we had to use an awful hack with the stuff function and XML encoding to output a set of values as a comma-separated list in a single row, which some reports want. If the folks asking me for these awfully formatted reports had ever had to figure this out, I couldn’t blame them for not wanting to learn any more.
A hack I’ve used more than once myself since Microsoft didn’t get around to adding string_agg until SQL Server 2017.
@Ouroborobot
Same here. Unfortunately, since we haven’t upgraded to 2017 at my work, I still don’t have the option of
string_agg.I wonder sometimes when I hear stories like this how complex the spreadsheet they were getting fed into was. I used to download huge databases into excel, but my spreadsheet was set up in such a way as to then automatically carve up the database into dozens of different formats/sorts I needed it in.
I’m not entirely sure, but I’m suspicious using SQL commands to draw that data out sort-by-sort would have taken longer, especially since it had to end up in Excel in the end anyway.
to do in five minutes what could be done in thirty seconds with a SQL query
In company with the other comments, you’re neglecting to add in “but first I have to spend five hours messing around trying to get the damn query to work reliably and reproducibly” 🙂
Excel is great, but it really isn’t meant for databases, but the problem is that Access isn’t meant for the kinds of things you can and need to do with Excel, either.
That’s not the problem, that’s the would-be solution! If it were that simple, we could look at a problem and saying, “Welp, this is a database, so we know we need Access.”
The problem is really that there’s a fair bit of overlap in what you can do with one or the other, which can lead to pounding nails with a wrench, especially if you only have competency with one or the other.
The problem is really that there’s a fair bit of overlap in what you can do with one or the other
I have stuff at work (e.g. keeping track of job applicants) where it really could go into a database but I then tend to go “Ah feck it, I’m using Excel the most anyway, it’s just as easy to throw it into a spreadsheet” so I do that. (I used to be so well-behaved in a previous job! I had lovely neat organised databases with queries! and reports! all lovingly formatted! But now I am a careless slattern!)
Then there’s “This really should go into a dedicated database but I need to do Mathematical Things with it as well so better stick it into Excel even though I know I will later be cursing the day I was born when I’m trying to extract information from it”.
And minorly thirdly, “I need to send this on to The Boss and they’re just about handling opening and reading a spreadsheet in Excel, if I try sending something in or from Access they’ll explode” 🙂
As someone who knows a lot of excel and is learning SQL, there are an awful lot of times where I know I could do something in SQL, but it’s much easier to copy the data into excel and just do it there because I know that better and will be certain it’s right. And that goes about 100x if it’s something I ever want to show to someone else.
Business analyst. But that might involve fucking around with Jira/Confluence as well.
On the rare occasions when someone decides I need a job title, this is the one that usually gets thrown at me. I split my time among fucking around in Excel, fucking around in Power BI, fucking around in MySQL, writing documentation for things in Word (if someone other than me has to see it) or Notepad (if it’s just for me), emailing people to remind them they need to do things, and running meetings where people more important than me talk about stuff.
Analyst especially financial analyst of various shades.
I’d highly recommend learning at least a some SQL, Tableau, and/or R if you want ahead of the curve. More and more jobs require some accessing of more data than Excel generally plays nicely with and the above tools give you a solid head and shoulders above someone who only knows Excel.
If you don’t have experience already as a financial analyst, and you learn SQL, how much of a leg up does that give you?
In getting a job or actually doing the job?
Most people looking to hire Financial Analysts are looking for someone who already has some relevant experience. If you don’t have relevant experience, you probably won’t even pass through the HR filter.
In actually doing the job, a lot, because you can slice up data a lot quicker, and slicing up data turns soul-crushing quite quickly. However, you need to be able to present your findings to decision-makers. Doesn’t matter how smart or skilled you are if you can’t explain anything.
I meant in getting a job. How is anyone supposed to get a career in that field?
This x 1,000. The biggest hurdle job seekers have for us is their presentation. If you come in and give a great academic-style presentation but can’t give a decent elevator pitch for your research, it’s unlikely that you get hired.
Product engineer for a company that provides analysis tools to other companies. The question is if you mean “number crunching in Excel, but only with pre-existing spreadsheets,” or “coming up with new spreadsheets with shiny features” for what you want to do.
Welcome to Hollywood. This time the Executive Producer has been watching a lot of Three Stooges, and wants to make some similar dumb fun, but aimed at modern tastes. What can we make for him that’s fit for the world of Idiocracy?
What’s wrong with the staple: “Ow, my balls!”?
Too sophisticated?
Ass is the Oscar-winner. Ow My Balls is the Emmy-winner.
I’ve always wanted to see a film adaptation of the Dumb Bunnies books. “This is the best week we’ve had all day!”
Those books are so funny. Same author as captain underpants, right? I’m dating myself, but the highlight of my life as a kid was when a new one would come out and I’d get to the gag where they rearranged the letters on a sign.
Yeah, Dav Pilkey. I don’t know what the status of the Dumb Bunnies books is now, but 20 years ago, when I was reading them to my friends’ kids, they were already borderline un-PC (because you can’t make fun of stupid people, right?)
I remember bringing a Dumb Bunnies book for a volunteer gig with inner-city kids, and getting blowback because apparently kids should only read serious, uplifting, character-building literature.
If someone had tried to take away my Dumb Bunnies, I think I would have started a gang right there and then.
I’ve always wanted to do a modern remake of A Night at the Opera with like, an ensemble cast of modern lowgrade comedy actors. Will Farrell and John C. Riley and Adam Sandler and Melissa McCarthy and what the hell throw Rob Schneider in there too. No need to update the premise, because the high art/low comedy distinction would actually be even more exacerbated. An opera in 2022, with all those morons screwing everything up.
I would definitely support this.
See Brain Donors (1992).
The important thing, I think, is to have the same premise and atmosphere, but totally different gags (otherwise it will feel hollow). so no stateroom scene, no sanity clause scene…but then do the finale SHOT FOR SHOT exactly like in the original: Melissa McCarthy swinging from the ropes while Will Farrell or whoever sings the duet from Il Travatore
You cant. Everyone has already exceeded their entire tolerance for stupid by watching the news, so the only hope of getting viewers is humor which is clever.
Middle of the road to highfalutin is the way to go. So. 30 minutes of puns! (dont kill me)
some similar dumb fun, but aimed at modern tastes
Isn’t that the entire career of Adam Sandler and when the Jackass lot were popular? I can’t throw stones, when I was five I thought The Three Stooges were the height of comedic genius (I nearly got my mother and myself thrown out of the local cinema when she brought me to see one of the movies, I was laughing so hard and so loud).
“And the language! Do you know what ‘nyuk, nyuk, nyuk’ means in Tenctonese?”
For some reason, I’ve always either liked serious movies or something Adam Sandler level, with little in between. I’d argue most modern stuff has aimed more mid-level, away from the simply absurd/silly, which is what I consider Sandler movies to be. They just make absolutely no pretense to taking themselves seriously for a single second, so I never find it cringeworthy.
I think a burlesque style would be good for right now–either dealing with a silly topic in a super grave way, or dealing with a serious topic in a super absurd way. We’re stuck in irony mode, and need to push it further, make it less “knowing”-focused. I think of the scene in Billy Madison–“I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.” Like, you kind of think you know what’s coming at that moment, but the guy just keeps going further, and then flips from talking about the points and insulting him to that bizarrely grave, anachronistic ending. Truly enjoying absurdity is what makes for dumb fun.
If the pandemic were not so grave, it’d be ripe for an “Airplane!” style mock 70s disaster-movie remake , with our lead the heroic doctor (perhaps fresh home from a stint with Médecins Sans Frontières*) tackling an outbreak of The Lurgy before it can spread (think “The Andromeda Strain” but for something that is totally silly – maybe a virus that makes the victims want to only wear Crocs or Ugg boots**?)
*Scene at cocktail party: “Oh Doctor Lovechild***, wherever have you been?” “Just returned from a tour with MSF in the most deprived, backwards, unfortunate areas” “Oh goodness me, where were you – X, Y, Z?” “No, Waterford****”)
**Seemingly these items of footwear have fallen out of favour after their brief moment of fashion glory? I have no idea. Substitute Birkenstocks or whatever other footwear is considered laughable.
***Joke stolen wholesale from Australian hospital comedy “Let The Blood Run Free” – the name of the villain (more or less) and a more polite way to let the audience know that he’s a bas_d!
****Joke stolen wholesale from Oliver Callan’s skit about Leo Varadkar, who has an Indian father and Irish mother, in which ‘Leo’ talks about knowing the problems of backwards etc. Third World conditions – after all, one of his parents is from… Waterford!
Hey, it’s not so grave everywhere!
FWIW, my social media feed is full of friends, family, and coworkers posting cute pictures of themselves drinking Corona beer and playing the Pandemic board game.
So Indians make Fine Gaels.
Insert Indo-European culture joke here.
I just wish Adam Sandler still made Adam Sandler movies. All he’s been doing for 15 years now is cashing checks for him and his buddies for absolute dreck they film in a weekend.
I’ve brought this up before in OTs that nobody makes the mass appeal quotable comedies anymore. No more 40 Year Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Tropic Thunder, etc. I miss one or two of those movies coming out a year.
At the risk of going really CW, I’ve heard a lot of speculation that this is related to nearly all famous comedians being terrified of offending the woke crowd. Comedy is too risky to be worth attempting anymore.
The risk is that Chinese, etc, audiences won’t understand any comedy beyond slapstick and fart jokes because the cultural context is different. Famous stand-up comics may be scaling back their material out of fear of the woke brigade, but there’s not much crossover between what standup comics are doing and what movies like Tropic Thunder are doing.
But how much would you care if the woke crowd was mad at you, if you had a very successful movie? I mean, some randos from Twitter and a couple unpaid interns at clickbait factories will call you problematic, but they do that at everyone all the time.
The real threat to commercial success of movies nowdays is showing/not showing the Nine Dash Line on maps and stuff like that.
It reminds me of when the Red Dawn remake changed the villains from China to North Korea at the last minute even though the later has no plausible means of invading the US, let alone attempting to occupy it.
“But how will it play in China?” is a good excuse for a $250 million dollar blockbuster that needs to make a billion dollars worldwide. But for some $20 million dollar comedy…meh? They can still do just fine with that domestically, and it’s not like the comedic actors have anything else to do.
It also doesn’t appear to be true. The highest grossing comedy of all time (unadjusted, googled) is the Hangover 2, and that had > half its box office from overseas, and Hangover 3 had 2/3rds from overseas (10th all time).
I haven’t watched any of the “Hangover” flicks, but their premise and I’m guessing most of their content is less culture-specific than e.g. the movies on Conrad’s original list.
And I’m also fairly confident that the people who greenlight even midlist comedies are hoping for Hangover-like international success as a top-of-the-bell-curve outcome, rather than “We specifically plan to invest $20E6 for $60E6 domestic revenue, that’s profit enough, who cares about the Chinese?” Such movies will still be made, but with greatly reduced frequency.
On the non-comedy front, I’ve heard Matt Damon say that he doesn’t expect to be able to do more movies like “The Martian” or “Ford v Ferarri” specifically because of the low international sales potential and the priorities of the current greenlighters. And those are the kind of movies I really like.
The problem is more that Ford Vs Ferrari didn’t do particularly well at domestic box offices. The first two hangovers both had 2X better domestic box office returns than FVF, and did so on smaller budgets.
he Martian grossed 400 of its 630 million in the foreign market and did so ~110 million budget, so complaints about the foreign box office seem off there.
I would say the main issue is that you can make a movie like the hangover for $40 million, but Matt Damon wants to make $100 million + movies, that aren’t just well written and well acted, but also with good action or visuals which make the multiplier harder to hit.
I’m also surprised specifically about The Martian given how it positively portrays China (they’re not the main focus of the movie, but they play a crucial role in saving Mark after the US mess up their own rocket)
Stooge-ish dumb fun aimed at modern tastes is entirely in the realm of online personalities now, no narrative needed. Have him watch the Twitch channels that specialize in Mario Maker troll levels, sketch comedy by the likes of the McElroys, or select Rooster Teeth shows that are slapstick heavy, like Million Dollars But.
For @Plumber: ‘Milwaukee Sewer Socialism‘
Now that we’re onto full-on culture war: Your week in the political winners and losers!
Winners:
Despite the media narrative that he is personally forcing people to consume fish tank cleaner and responsible for not shutting all the borders down, fixing the FDA, CDC and WHO, Trump is a big winner so far. 60% of Americans think he’s handling the crisis well and he has the best approval of his Presidency. Trends aren’t everything, but this is one that should make Trump happy.
On the other side of the aisle, Governor Cuomo has been seen as effective and competent. He and the President are weird buddies right now, both complementing each other despite their political animosity, which isn’t likely to fade at the end, but for now is put on the back burner. I already said good job to California, so good job New York State! @Plumber, that’s a bonus “things I never thought I’d say”.
Tucker Carlson called for more action earlier, and has been consistently ahead of the curve in his recommendations. Big credibility gains, and the President is clearly taking his recommendations seriously.
Losers:
The media in general. Getting into slap fights with everyone and trying to gaslight on what they were saying at the start of the month has tanked their already bad credibility.
Joe Biden. Vanishing in the middle of an epidemic, then reemerging to give really poorly done interviews and commercials while quarantined has not helped with making people view him as credible to lead, although he certainly has time to recover. Additionally, his pledge to pick a woman as VP has made him unable to choose Cuomo, which would be a slam dunk for a man for whom a good successor is a big deal. Cuomo would be a huge advantage for a D ticket right now.
The CDC/WHO/FDA. The institutional experts have performed really badly in the West in general, including the United States. Good example from FiveThirtyEight of how really awful the predictions are. The median prediction was 20,000 cases next Sunday. We are at 52k today. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/infectious-disease-experts-dont-know-how-bad-the-coronavirus-is-going-to-get-either/
Globalism. It turns out that when the globe is entirely interconnected an unsanitary food market in Wuhan can overturn your life in Richmond. This will be a big deal to a lot of people and globalism is going to get a lot less popular worldwide, especially amongst the suburban non-elite who aren’t regularly jet-setting to the Alps but had to stay home for weeks because others are.
If Trump succeeds in getting the country reopened by mid-April, it’s going to increase excess mortality from coronavirus in the US by tens of thousands. There’s no winners there.
The country isn’t closed. Some cities and states are. Treating the United States as an entity would be a huge mistake rather than quarantining major outbreaks (like New York) and letting the rest of the country work to help them.
The interesting question will be – if the nation as a whole is doing well – will the federal government have any appetite for going after states and localities who maintain “shelter in place” style orders and forcing them to open up?
My guess is no, but we could see some pretty quick and impressive tribal re-alignment on questions of federalism and states rights pretty darn quick if they try…
No way they crack down on that. That’s an absolute no-win situation for the Feds.
I dunno, I think I can devise a hypothetical where they might.
Like, how long can Dallas County officials keep gun stores closed because it’s an “emergency?” What if, six months from now, there is no major outbreak there, and the county officials still won’t lift the order?
At some point, someone has to step in and say “No, you can’t do this, it’s unconstitutional,” right?
NY and California have already taken the public position that this outbreak will last for 6-8 months, haven’t they? If five months from now they’re still banning weddings and church services and the case/death rate seems to have flattened, is everybody really going to just go along with that?
I think that assumes a few things, as I don’t see any politician with flat or falling deaths and cases being able to keep closed under that kind of constituent pressure.
Meaning “I just don’t see that as a real problem”.
Now, if they’re specifically closing e.g. gun stores and letting everything else open, that’s when the Feds will step in and smack them down, but that’s a bit different.
The biggest and most immediate challenges in this area are likely to be those accused of crimes that cannot get trials. Lawyers are already starting to work on challenges to that, and it’s much easier to convince a court that this needs to get resolved NOW than a store closure.
Also interestingly, unlike weddings or gun stores, even if one ignores the bill of rights, indefinite detention (either awaiting a postponed trial, or simply being told to stay put by your governor) raises some kind of “pure” constitutional habeas issue. I’m waiting for this to become a “thing.” Give it a few weeks.
18 states, containing more than half the country’s population, have shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders right now. Most likely, that should be universal.
This is not contained to New York; New York is just further along than the rest of the country. Relieving shelter-in-place – and giving the impression that the pandemic is contained – is extremely irresponsible. By the end of April, we will have multiple New York-level outbreaks in several cities across the US. Without shelter-in-place orders, those outbreaks will accelerate beyond our ability to control and treat.
Indeed. That is the decision of each governor, which is an American advantage. Also, note that it is similar to what China did. China did not institute national stay at home, but only quarantined cities to the level needed. Their response is currently being praised internationally. Shouldn’t we copy it?
New York has 15,000 cases right now. Which cities do you think will have outbreaks of that size by the end of April? Do any of them fall outside a current stay at home order?
For how long? The current incubation period is believed to be 14 days. We are currently 9 days into national distancing measures.
Yes. Which means keeping cities shut down as long as necessary to keep the outbreak contained. Reopening by Easter, as Trump wants, is foolish.
Miami and New Orleans, at the very least. The stay at home orders are useful, but you can’t completely relieve them until herd immunity becomes available. The point I’m trying to make is that setting an arbitrary deadline for reopening the country is the action of someone who is either extraordinarily callous or disconnected from reality.
The average incubation period is estimated to be around 3 to 7 days, up to 14, but there are outliers of up to 4 weeks. Until herd immunity becomes available, any one of those outliers could reinfect the entire population. Even worse, there’s the risk of someone with the virus leaving a quarantine zone before becoming symptomatic, creating a disease reservoir outside of the quarantine zone, leaving the possibility of reinfection of the quarantine zone after the quarantine is lifted. Once a disease becomes endemic, you can’t just starve it out in 3 or 4 weeks, and coronavirus is almost certainly endemic at this point. Lockdowns have to continue until we have a vaccine, or we’ll face a massive death toll.
@broblawsky
Both of those have stay at home orders.
If Trump is overriding local stay at home orders with “I order New York to open over the wishes of the governor”, then that would indeed be quite foolish. And unconstitutional. I would oppose that.
What Trump is looking at is removing national direction that is no longer needed in most other places as of Easter, which would be close to a month after the initial restrictions.
Not if we have the capability to test ~60k people a day and are doing contact tracing. That has proven effective in South Korea without needing wide-ranging shutdowns.
A vaccine won’t exist for 9-18 months. We cannot sustain this level of lockdown that long. It’s simply not in the realm of plausibility. We need to be able to focus our lockdowns and remove it at the national level.
Note that we can’t sustain it not only for economic reasons but for human social reasons. You’re already getting low-scale violations. A 9 month lockdown would require draconian measures to enforce. Doing that level of lockdown in Coeur d’Alene because Miami needs it is just silly.
The stay at home orders are, themselves, unconstitutional.
(Yes, I know that the courts have previously ruled “this is all okay if it’s an emergency.” I don’t care. The constitution itself does not anywhere state “None of this applies so long as you yell ‘I DECLARE EMERGENCY’ first.” And while I am a supporter of federalism in general, the incorporation doctrine would seem to imply that states cannot violate the basic freedoms of assembly, religion, commerce, self-defense, etc. either.)
What does “reopen the country by Easter” mean to you? Because to me, it means ending stay-at-home orders early. Trump might not be able to force governors to do that, but he can definitely make it harder for them to maintain those orders, if only by telling people that they are safe to go out.
@Matt M
Quarantine has a long history of being allowable even before modern riding roughshod over the Constitution. This is one I don’t have a problem with as a really strong states rights and strict Constitutional guy.
@broblawsky
Removing broad-based restrictions and moving to targeted quarantines and contact tracing would be “opening up the country”. That can still allow local stay at home orders to remain in place.
This is what we need to do to beat the coronavirus, BTW. We need to maintain lockdown until cases per day peak, not just in one quarantine zone but everywhere in the country. That’s going to require a minimum of 40 days of universal shelter-in-place, not just in NYC or New Orleans, but everywhere. Rural/suburban areas are not immune to this; it’s just going to affect them a little slower. Then and only then can we relax shelter-in-place protocols, as long as we have a strong test-and-trace program. That won’t stop coronavirus, but it will minimize the deaths it causes, as well as the economic damage. Even if Trump’s “reopen the country by Easter” policy is as limited as facilitating piecemeal shelter-in-place, it’s still going to result in tens of thousands of deaths as the coronavirus infiltrates non-quarantined areas. If it means trying to force NYC and other heavily affected areas to reopen, the death toll might be much worse.
I think its fairer to say that they are probably unconstitutional. No one knows how far a state’s general police powers extend in situations like this, and I think it’s unlikely to emerge as a justiciable issue (oh hey, this is a totally new area where I can talk about justiciability on SSC). Think of how it would actually emerge in practice:
Governor: “Everyone, stay in your homes”
Citizen: “Except me, I’m gonna go visit my friend”
Governor: “Please don’t do that”
Citizen: “Screw you”
Governor: “dang”
you’re unlikely to see cases just because, I think, governors are unlikely to actually enforce any part of the shelter in place orders that seem unreasonable, and even if they did, the order would end before you could martial a legal challenge to fight it, unless it was a situation the courts were primed to care about (you’ll see above I discussed potential criminal/habeas issues, that is likely the first place you will see challenges in this area IMHO)
@Matt M, quarantine orders have a longstanding history in Anglo-American legal tradition. States were using them throughout the 1700’s and 1800’s, until public health improved to the point where they weren’t often necessary.
You could argue the 14th Amendment ended that power, but I hesitate – and courts would hesitate more – to say such general terms override such longstanding traditions. At the very least, if you argue that, you should also agree that the Thirteenth Amendment bans both the draft and mandatory jury duty.
@broblawsky
Thanks for that. I think it’s overkill, but I appreciate where you’re coming from.
And I want to emphasize that although I think we need to reopen some and get as much going as we can, if Trump does mean “fully open even New York by Easter”, then I’ll oppose that, just like I opposed him when he wasn’t cutting travel enough for me back in January/February.
It’s not terribly uncommon on the farther right to think we should’ve been stricter earlier. I think the travel bans still don’t go far enough and should extend at least the next several months, for example.
@broblawsky
I looked at your link and it looks pretty close to what we’re already doing, except you want a federal order to do it instead of state-by-state. I don’t see why South Dakota needs to shut down their economy just because things are bad in New York. I don’t think that will get things back to normal any faster, but it will cause a lot of unnecessary economic suffering.
I don’t know what to do, but the QALYs for the healthy poor who lose their jobs need to be accounted for, too, not just those for the elderly and infirm.
There are cases in South Dakota right now – not a lot as far as we know, but probably more than we believe. Without a lockdown, those cases will infect others, which will a) kill people and b) create a disease reservoir that can reinfect currently locked-down areas after the lockdown passes.
Edit: also, as far as I know, there’s no credible plan for a federal test-and-trace program (and it has to be federal to be effective). Without that, lockdowns aren’t enough.
I’m not a universal basic income believer under normal circumstances, but this is the time for it. We need to just print money for a couple of months, and drop it on people from helicopters if need be.
Edit: Also, don’t assume that the economy will go back to normal just because we end the lockdown. Waves of disease will sweep though workplaces, potentially shutting them down for weeks and killing older people with important institutional expertise. Fear will keep people indoors and away from consumer spending, or sicken or kill them, preventing them from even being able to spend. If you want a real recovery, and not a protracted slowdown, a universal lockdown followed by federal test-and-trace is the only option.
I don’t care if there’s “long history.” It’s still unconstitutional. The constitution does not have a “you can do what you want if it’s an emergency” clause.
If you want it to have a clause like that, you need to amend it so that it does.
@Matt M, in that case, do you believe the First Amendment makes all libel and slander laws unconstitutional? Do you believe the Thirteenth Amendment makes mandatory jury duty unconstitutional? And can we disarm people currently in prison nonwithstanding the Second Amendment?
As much as we might want the Constitution to be interpretable in a vacuum, I’ve been forced to realize it isn’t.
You are correct that “it’s an emergency, I can do what I want” is a dumb argument, but the informed arguments aren’t going to be phrased that way. A court is going to look at how the constitutional absolutes have been interpreted in similar circumstances. For example, if I get drafted, I can’t just say “It reads plain as day in the 13th amendment, NO INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE, this is clearly that, go away.” A court is just going to say “Well no Mr. Theodidactus, one thing is very different than the other, and historically…” As another example, the 4th amendment reads as a hard absolute, but there are endless exceptions and exceptions-to-exceptions-to-exceptions, many of which emerge as clear historical precedent going back to the founders themselves.
I’m not necessarily saying I disagree with you that a general quarantine is unconstitutional. I’m saying, though, that its a far touchier subject than you might think. We still can’t even agree on which portions of the bill of rights apply to the states, let alone how state police powers work in situations like this.
What clause of the constitution do you think a state-level quarantine violates? States have plenary police powers.
Freedom of assembly as incorporated by the fourteenth amendment is the obvious one here. I doubt anyone will be volunteering to serve as a test case in the next few weeks, but if the lockdown is enforced for a long enough period, probably someone will.
Right.
If we want to throw out the incorporation doctrine entirely, I’m fine with that.
But so long as it exists to hamstring states rights in general, it should also exist to hamstring this sort of behavior…
Interestingly, you might not even need to charge in waving an amendment. The constitution itself seems to assume habeas corpus as a baseline…which necessarily implies a natural state of non-confiment/non-restraint. No one knows where an argument like this would go, obviously, but if I was literally told not to leave my apartment under criminal penalty, my mind would naturally go to habeas.
obviously, all current shelter-in-place orders fall far short of that, and I concur with some comments above that it’s probably within the state’s police powers to ban restaurants (even in non-emergencies) ban nightclubs (even in non-emergencies) and heavily regulate supermarkets (even in non-emergencies)
EDIT: As regards incorporation: it’s far from straightfoward how incorporation would work with restraints like these, especially in a first amendment context. Incorporation doesn’t say “all amendments apply to states, done” There are plenty of elements of the bill of rights that are unincorporated (grand juries, juries in some civil cases), and when you look at why they’re unincorporated, it’s generally some kind of nebulous expediency rationale, something very close to “I dunno man, states just do things differently sometimes.” Again, this is all very much an unclear area of law.
I would imagine a pandemic is one of the recognized exceptions to the first amendment right to freedom of assembly
Where in the constitution are these exceptions listed? Or even hinted at?
I appreciate that the court has decided, on its own, to “recognize” such things. That doesn’t mean they actually exist.
If the court decides the exception exists, it exists. Right up until you can get the court to reverse itself.
If you say otherwise, you aren’t appealing to constitutional rights, but something else entirely.
@HeelBearCub:
Reminds me of that one time in 1787 when the 13 colonies ratified “something else entirely.”
I invite you to establish some constitutional means of showing that Marbury v. Madison doesn’t arise from the powers vested by the constitution.
@HeelBearCub:
Heh. Fair enough.
Matt M:
I understand your point, I think, but it seems an isolated demand for rigor. You can’t complain about the lack of a list of exceptions but then lean on the doctrine of incorporation, which is also not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution or its amendments.
ISTM that whenever we’re looking at a case where federalism might be used to reduce government control over individuals, we’re told that isn’t allowed because the incorporation doctrine mandates federal supremacy over the states.
But now that we’re looking at cases where federalism is being used to increase government control over individuals, we’re told that’s all fine and dandy and that we have to respect state’s rights.
True enough, but you’re slicing the situation against the grain. In this case Federalism is not being used to increase Federal control over individuals. And that’s the whole point of Federalism.
Fine, let me be much more blatant/direct/honest/whatever:
Every time the states try to do something that’s different from what the federal government wants, and it’s something I like, I’m told they can’t because of federal supremacy and the incorporation doctrine.
Every time the states try to do something that’s different from what the federal government wants, and it’s something I don’t like, I’m told they have to be allowed to do it because of federalism.
Now maybe they’re being perfectly consistent and logical and I’m just unlucky to have super weird preferences. But that’s certainly not how it feels…
The notion that states absolutely cannot be allowed to have different policies on say, abortion, but absolutely must be allowed to have different policies on, say, closing down gun stores, breaking up weddings, and closing down businesses indefinitely at their own discretion just isn’t flying with me. Sorry.
That there is what they call “bullshit”.
Different states do have different policies on abortions. Look at the policies in NY and AL and try and show me how they are not different policies.
There are also specific abortion policies which are unconstitutional, because of the rights of the individual under the constitution.
If some state was trying to confiscate all firearms during the pandemic, I’m pretty damn sure that wouldn’t survive the immediate legal challenge.
It’s almost like people largely argue based on outcomes, and arguments to principle are just a post-hoc rationalization.
It might seem like people say your state can’t do things you like because of supremacy and can do things you don’t like because of federalism, but I can guarentee you that “your side” is making the same arguments with the signs reversed.
The Louisiana National Guard did this in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. I never heard of any legal challenge at all.
@Matt M
Because it is a one way…well it’s not really a ratchet because you can undo it. Eh, I can’t come up with a good analogy.
I generally dislike government power exerted over individuals. However, the closer that power is to the individual, the less I’m bothered by it, because the power is being exerted by a more responsive entity. Unresponsive Federal bureaucracy 2,000 miles away mandating/banning religious displays on public property? Gross abuse of power. My own city council whose meetings are a few miles from my house doing the same thing? Enforcing community standards, no problem.
I’m against Federal power. Power itself I’m more agnostic about.
@Matt M
There was a legal challenge. The gun confiscation was enjoined and the city forced to settle and return the guns, although they resisted pretty aggressively.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20150821/a-decade-later-remember-new-orleans-gun-confiscation-can-and-has-happened-in-america
Must be nice to have authority — any authority at all — at all responsive to you. (other than the sort of response where they fine, imprison or kill you)
@The Nybbler
Yes, it’s this crazy concept called “voting in your city elections” or “moving to the next town over.”
My town’s politics are old-fashioned machine politics… as are all the nearby towns. Voice is impossible and exit is futile. My county is machine also, with County Executive For Life Joe D. Vincenzo running the place by decree. My state is run by a stupid and corrupt Democratic billionaire who buys into all the progressive causes; this is the usual case in NJ. Every once in a while such governors over-reach and are replaced by stupid and corrupt Republicans who do only slightly better (by my perspective).
I’m not even sure what a “stay at home” order means. In my city, most folks are already staying at home, and there will probably be an official stay-at-home order issued within a few days (as just happened in our sister city 10 miles down the road).
Does an official stay-at-home order mean that police can arrest unrelated people gathering in large (five, 10 or more) groups? It seems that the effectiveness of any such order would depend on levels of enforcement and police manpower.
I think it mostly means if they see a large gathering they will order them to disperse. They will probably comply.
@Bobobob, yes, the Stay-At-Home order here in Washington State means the police can do that. They’ve said they won’t, but they could.
The NJ cops have already broken up a few weddings. This whole thing is a dream for mean-spirited authoritarians.
Jeez, I am REALLY looking forward to all the apologies by all you anti-Trump fearmongers. You will apologize if it turns out you were wrong, right?
On the other hand: thank you for stating your opinion so clearly, making it really difficult for your future self to weasel out of it and pretend otherwise.
I hope that neither you or any of your relatives are elderly, immunocompromised, or have reduced lung function.
@broblawsky
My mom is a 69 year old woman with reduced lung function from scaring who requires supplemental oxygen.
I care a LOT about keeping her from being infected, and have had several conversations with her and my father about how we can do that.
But shutting down a city with few cases a thousand miles away isn’t the way to do that.
Yes, it is. This is, AFAICT, the consensus opinion of the economic and epidemiological community. I hope your mother weathers this well.
We probably need shelter-in-place everywhere. But
1) different parts of the country can come out of it earlier.
2) some parts can come out *even if* cases are still high in a far away region
3) saying “it must be 40 days” sets us up for losing. One of the points of shutting down earlier is that your shutdown can be shorter. A two-week shutdown might be all you need if you only have minimal cases right now. We want places that haven’t been hit hard to realize “you need to take your medicine, but the dose is smaller if you act fast.”
@Edward:
“realize” seems like a strong word here. I’d switch out “realize for something like, “agree with our prediction of the future, which is based on an incomplete understanding of the present,”
One problem here is that we’re likely to see infected areas spread to other places. If there are thousands of cases in NYC, it only takes a couple of them each taking flights to, say, St Louis, San Antonio, and Little Rock, and maybe you’ve got a new outbreak starting.
My intuition is that the school closings are probably a big win in terms of slowing the spread of the virus. Respiratory and stomach bugs go through schools all the time, and they definitely make it back into the kids’ homes. I’ll admit that I suspect online learning is probably just fine for most kids, too, so probably not so much is lost in terms of education–but that’s an empirical matter than needs to be measured.
Closing bars and restaurants is probably smart, as well. And letting as many people as possible work from home.
We (“we” meaning county/state health departments, virologists, epidemiologists, etc.) should start working up best practices for operating various kinds of businesses in a COVID19 world, because when we go back out of full social distancing mode, we’re going to need some intermediate state between “nobody leave your home” and “let’s all ride crowded subways to crowded workplaces and then ride them to crowded bars after work.”
@Edward Scizorhand
Is that true, though? Seems like it only works if you completely eliminate any spread of the disease with the lockdown. Otherwise you’re just kind of switching to 1/4 playback speed until you un-lock down at which point things pick back up where they were before.
In fact I am, and I have. And guess what: we shelter in place.
No need for everyone else to do it though, that´s only detrimental.
And that is exactly Trump´s point, and it is going to happen in April.
If you aren’t already up shit creek, what a lockdown does is let you get a handle on the number of cases you’ve got. If everyone holds still for 2 weeks, you can work backwards and contact-trace the people who turn up sick — which is going to be our long-term solution anyway.
It’s hopeless to contact-trace in NYC because there are so many cases. They need to halve their number of cases several more times. But if a county of a million people has 10 cases, they can chase them down.
Will you do the same?
Italy has a population of ~60 million people, and about 7k deaths so far. Similarly, South Korea has had 126 deaths and about ~50 million people. The US has ~320 million people. Why would you expect the US trajectory to be more similar to South Korea’s than Italy’s?
One advantage the US has here is that much of it is very spread out and car-oriented. In the DC suburb where I live, most people drive to go anywhere. Right away, this implies a lot more convenient social distancing–going to and from the store, work, school, etc., is naturally done in a way that’s not spreading your virus to anyone else.
Most people around here live in single family houses, townhouses, or condos. There are certainly people who share houses and lots of folks with roommates, but even so, they’re generally not super crowded. There are lots of open spaces to go walking/running/biking, tennis courts, basketball courts, parks, etc., all open, where keeping 2m distance from everyone else nearly all the time is pretty easy. Few people live in high-rise apartments with shared lobbies and hallways and elevators.
Similarly, it’s workable to do a lot from your car. I can order a lot of stuff (not groceries, alas) from the local Target and have it brought out to my car, with very little opportunity to give or receive infection. Supermarkets and box stores here are big, so it’s not very hard to do social distancing within the store, which probably helps some. Everyone has a kitchen and it’s not so hard even in a not-very-big house to store enough food for a couple weeks of reasonable eating. For that matter, there are lots of drive through restaurants, pharmacies, and even a drive-through Starbucks not so far away. Again, this all makes social distancing much easier.
Contrast all this with NYC. My sense is that of anywhere in the US, NYC is probably the worst-situated to stop the spread of the virus with social distancing, lockdown, etc. Small apartments, small kitchens, crowded streets and parks, no parking and lots of residents without cars, mass transit as the only practical way for the city to function, small stores, etc. I expect the virus to rip through NYC and infect a huge chunk of the population, and I don’t see any way to prevent it. Social distancing can work in suburban Maryland. It can work even better in most of the rest of the US. But it seems almost hopeless in NYC.
My prediction is that NYC will become the focal point of a huge number of infections, and that even as the rest of the country successfully locks down/socially distances, NYC will have a very hard time doing so. I expect that as things get worse there, we will see lots of people leaving the city to go other places, and that this will spread infections around. I don’t have any idea how to stop this, given the existence of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic carriers. You could imagine the virus dying out in Montana or Iowa or Utah or even suburban Maryland or Pennsylvania, but big Eastern cities are likely to become sources for reinfection everywhere.
This isn’t so much a prediction as a postdiction; it’s already happened.
Because
https://mobile.twitter.com/serguht/status/1242952415877500928
and
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SesxgaPnpT6OfCYuaFSwXzDK4cDKMbivoALprcVFj48/edit
@jstr
As I said in another thread:
Ser Guht is comparing apples to oranges, and makes an unfounded prediction. I wouldn’t use him as a source.
What do you mean, there are a ton of winners there. It’s the dust speck debate IRL
Just to get away from the sound bites and exaggerated reporting, what Trump actually said, transcribed by me personally from video:
That looks like it’s the second thing Trump said, not the first thing he said.
Of course Trump is something of a quantum particle, simultaneously in every single position, so perhaps an ordering of positions is irrelevant.
Ha! I love this.
If you’re interested in punditry, Jesse Kelly is worth keeping an eye on. He’s basically c-list now, but nobody has been more consistently and loudly pushing the “Re-open everything! Save the economy!” argument. In the event that COVID deaths are minimal and the economic disruption is severe, expect his stock/status to rise significantly.
How about the EU specifically? My guess is anti-EU sentiment is going to rise sharply throughout most of Europe (but I am not European and make no particular claim to understand their politics)
I know Jesse and read what he says. Not sure I agree with him, but your point on whose stock will rise is true.
Tougher to tell yet, and I am not European so I don’t have nearly the finger on the pulse that I do in the states.
Well they won’t.
EU specifically did not act regarding the epidemic (other than organize some funds and resources), the states had full autonomy to pursue whatever policies they saw fit. While there are some people trying to use the epidemic to push their anti-EU agenda, they’re immediately countered by others pointing out that the present mess is basically what they advocate for.
“Well they won’t.”
Let´s revisit this issue in four weeks. (Or longer, if you prefer; but I believe four weeks will be enough.)
That last one seems like a wild misread. The flu managed to make it around the globe in 1918 pretty quick and it wasn’t because of jetsetting globalists.
A pandemic in China that isn’t successfully contained is always going to be a problem in Richmond, and the only way to reduce the risk is greater engagement with the rest of the world, so you can hopefully help contain it while it is still small enough to contain.
It was because of returning soldiers from a major war, i.e. global travel.
Which Beijing specifically blocked during that phase. Even if this doesn’t stop general globalism, it should stop engagement with a country that uses slave labor and lies about internal problems like epidemics.
As a practical matter, the alternative to globalism isn’t “every country closes its borders except to rare special cases,” which is what it would take to keep something like Covid from spreading. The alternative to globalism, some of which we have, is for countries to have tariff barriers and immigration barriers making foreign goods more expensive and immigration more difficult. Do you believe things would be significantly different if we had that?
Do you think Trump’s tariffs against China, as distinct from closing down travel from China after Covid appeared, made any significant difference? That was the real world anti-globalist policy.
Yes. Most of the early cases of Coronavirus in both the United States and Italy were dual citizens or legal residents who had flown home to Wuhan in order to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
The spread outside of China would be much lower without those ready-made reservoirs.
In addition, making foreign goods more expensive would mean that surgical PPE and masks would’ve been made locally in the USA to a larger degree, which would mean our current shortage would be less severe and ramping up domestic production would have been easier.
Tracking cases is going to involve better border control. At the least, IR screens of everyone entering the country, whether citizens or not.
The seeming inability of the US to gear up and make its own masks, etc is indeed a glaring flaw in our current model, and one that hasn’t gone unnoticed. See, for example, the response to Larry Summers’ tweet wondering “Why can’t the greatest economy in the history of the world produce swabs, face masks and ventilators in adequate supply?”
Now, imagine if China were being actively belligerent against the US instead of merely shut down themselves.
That working class, all those people who actually have to go in to work, was already aggrieved about their jobs being sent over to China, whether or not that was actually happening. Now, their jobs are being very directly shut down due to our trade with China. And the people most responsible for it and least likely to be affected by it are arguing that they need to be kept out of work even longer.
@Atlas
Yes, Iran has substantial trade and high-level connections with China. Due to sanctions, almost all their trade is with China, making them substantially more vulnerable.
All three have the twin advantages of a culture that uses masks more and a substantially better climate for coronavirus spread reduction.
Taiwan was even further ahead ironically because they’re banned from WHO membership, so instead of believing their lies, they had to figure it out on their own and got ahead of the curve.
Pure speculation:
The truth will be the least relevant determinant of status of winning/losing. Instead, winners and losers will be entirely predetermined by their previous status in the eyes of the media and white urban dwellers with Ivy League degrees in the humanities (but I partially repeat myself.)
So:
The media wins (bold truth telling in a time of crisis!). The CDC/FDA win (fearless experts heroically struggling against an anti-science administration!) Trump loses (insert …everything..!). Joe Biden neither wins nor loses (the only demographic that matters here is decidedly neutral on Ridin with Biden)
But I’m a cynic.
Depends on how we’re defining things. This will definitely be the way winners/losers break down in certain circles, the story much of the media tells. The authorities will double down on their own importance, and could end up increasing their power.
But I do think they’ve badly lost face with a chunk of the population, though there is another chunk that simply seems unable to lose faith in the media. They’ll decry hype and bias and all that, but continue to define what is real and important as what is being talked about on TV, with no seeking out of other sources. But there is a definitive loss of legitimacy, even if it isn’t yet obvious. And others who were previously dismissed have definitely come to the attention of more people.
I definitely think the “total globalization is beyond question” crowd is a loser here. Not saying we will give up all global interaction by any means, but the subset who push utopian visions and argue inevitability took a nasty hit. I think the E.U. took a nasty hit. That the modern world is interconnected and will likely remain so is obvious, but it will be harder to go into fantasy world in which it makes sense to have key supply chains optimizing only for profit and not security. A totally “borderless” world with no possible need for borders or national action, just elites presiding over perfect order and harmony, now seems more obviously ridiculous. That national interests don’t conflict with global ones or business ones, especially in China, isn’t going to fly. I didn’t realize how many people seemed to find a pandemic like this beyond belief, but all those narratives about the world getting better in the aggregate did seem to push the idea that technology and modern medicine had balanced out health risks of globalization by keeping this sort of thing under control. That was obviously false, but the many who believed it now understand the issue. A lot of very popular but way too neat narratives took a very real, once-in-a-generation hit here. But I don’t know how much change will happen in the short-term.
Not sure how things will play out with Trump, Biden, Sanders, and some others. I think there were few real winners here, and a lot of losers. It’s also going to be hard to imagine how the election would have played out without this, and to assess the impact it had.
I’ll agree with globalism losing stock, but for different reasons. The shortage of PPE and testing capacity has a real chance to convince people, and especially the political elite, that offshoring industry to China and others has higher costs than previously thought. Given that the political elite had previously been the primary champions of free trade, I think this has the potential to see the most change.
Solid point. I would love to see serious onshoring efforts as a response to this.
Do I get Winner Points for this? I’ve been saying for 25 years that manufacturing everything in China is a terrible idea because next time we need it we’re going to find out the Arsenal of Democracy has been relocated to China. That we needed the weapons for fighting viruses instead of Nazis is quibbling.
Loser: NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio and NYC Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza look like morons for insisting schools had to stay open.
NJ Governor Murphy looks weak, in as much as he’s just been following Cuomo’s lead. But since Cuomo’s actions are well received, this may be basically no net impact for Murphy.
Have any kids gotten sick from those orders? I know NYC is in bad shape, but I hadn’t heard much about sick kids.
Closing public schools is a mitzvot anyway, so credit where credit is due.
Kids rarely get sick from this virus, but it probably resulted in some extra transmission.
If kids DID get sick, BdB and Carranza would have to worry about lynch mobs rather than lawsuits.
Any chance Cuomo might get a sex change so (s)he could get on Biden’s ticket?
More seriously, I think one winner might be federalism. Most of the quarantine orders in the US have (quite properly) come from state and local levels, leading to more respect for state governments.
Unfortunately, small business will also be a loser here.
I think any challenger would be in a no-win situation with regards to campaigning during a pandemic.
If you stick to your campaign and hold rallies and townhalls you’re perceived as massively irresponsible.
If you hide away you’re…not actually campaigning and perceived as weak.
If you’re supporting the incumbent because he’s doing some things right, you’re campaigning for him.
If you’re criticizing the incumbent you’re politicizing a crisis.
I would say the best move is do PSAs about washing your hands, and otherwise shut up and hope the crisis is over ASAP so you can get back to normal campaigning. It’s not a win but it’s the least losing option.
Also, with regards to losers, what’s everybody’s take on the stimulus/relief package thing? I haven’t been paying that much attention, but I’ve seen a lot of criticism of the Democrats for trying to put apparently unrelated stuff like environmental regulation into the relief bill.
I genuinely don’t know. Trump will get some boost, I think, because the direct transfers to people were proposed by him, but other than the “all Congresscritters suck”, I don’t see either party getting a significant boost.
By actual dollar amounts, the bill is about three things, and three things only.
The mass mailing of checks – democrat win, and also good policy, the beefing up of unemployment benefits – again, democrat win, and good policy, and the giant slush fund of corporate rescue money, which is a republican win, and in theory good policy if executed with integrity.
The democrats got some very, very pointed transparency and anti-selfdealing clauses put in that, so overall, got to call this a pretty good bill from a D standpoint, both from a “this is a pretty sensible bill” and “politically well constructed”
Of course, now everyone will get money from the federal government, which Trump is in charge of, so it will likely do him personally a bunch of good, but the democrats could not prevent that without letting people actually starve in quarantine, so…
Stopping the corporate rescue money from being literally directly spent on the Trump Organization is good but definitely insufficient. We may still be in a position where Trump doles out the money to supporters (depends on the bill’s details). When the money is being allocated between ABC Co. and XYZ Corp, will the decision be determined by which company’s CEO said the nicest things about Trump on TV? Or which company is sending the most people to stay in overpriced rooms in Trump hotels?
Why is Trump’s proposal being called a Democrat win? In what way is it a victory for them?
the media thinks there is only one reason anyone would ever look at someone funny
Winners:
1. Survivalists.
2. People who go on about the fragility of our systems. They shouldn’t because they usually exaggerate due to a fallacy of assuming that more moving parts means a system is more fragile.
3. Globalists, because of Trump’s failures detailed below.
4. Socialists, because they will be talking about the “corporate welfare” of the bailout for years. They’ll be right, not in the solution, but in identifying the hypocrisy of all these fans of capitalism looking for a handout. They’ll be saying “we bailed out the corporations, why can’t we do X?” The obvious answer is because we still have to pay down the debt we took on to bail out the corporations. But to a lot of people that sounds like parents telling their kid “hey, we can’t hold a birthday party for you because we wasted all our savings on your brother.”
Losers:
1. Trump. Even if he can convince an uninformed 60% of the population, he discredited himself in the eyes of people who actually know anything, and that matters. Because they’re in his administration and more of them than ever are convinced that it’s their patriotic duty to undermine him and look the other way at others doing so. And the uninformed will change their minds after several months of non-stop media attacks.
2. Right-wing populism. Though many saw it coming and ought to be able to say “told you so,” that can’t happen because it’s still bound up in the popular mind with Trump. I’ve experienced this IRL because I told people to stock up on food all the way back on Feb. 1, advice I also put on my blog post about it. Some are saying hey, wish I had listed to you…but they’re also asking me I’m glad I voted for Trump.
3. The American system. The irony is that we thought this would end up discrediting the Chinese system. But now it’s ours that looks pretty bad. Many Americans believe it’s their God-given right to have an opinion despite not knowing a d*** thing about the relevant subject.
If four years of non-stop media attacks didn’t change their minds, what makes you think another few months will?
Because it is. That is, in fact, what makes America different from China. You can claim heavy-handed authoritarianism is better than representative democracy if you want, and you might even be right. But that’s not the system we have.
It did for many, polls have Trump losing to Biden.
I think, all else being equal, that America’s system is better than China. But on this specific issue, it doesn’t look too great.
Trump lost the people he had already lost in exchange for only 60% of America! What a disaster!
I don’t think there is anyone in the administration who changed their view on Trump because of this. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I don’t see any evidence of it.
Thanks for giving an alternate view from mine. Even if I disagree it’s good to see.
One person with extensive knowledge of how law and bureaucracy works, or one person with the intelligence and wherewithal to sit down in front of some books and acquire it, is worth far more than one more Joe twelve-pack in terms of being able to influence public policy.
I agree with you. Trump was indeed dramatically hurt early in his Presidency by not understanding the importance of placing loyalists in places like Deputy Attorney General.
What I am saying is that this pandemic will create no new losses. Anyone who has decided to #Resist Trump has already decided that and his conduct so far hasn’t created anyone else.
Joe Biden being a complete non-entity during all of this, and the election in general being knocked out of the news cycle, probably helps Trump too.
Really? They’re on the top of my Loser List. I wouldn’t be surprised to see crackdowns on “pre-hoarders” in the future. A central example of the national media’s outgroup just provided strong evidence that they had a point all along, and you expect that outgroup to get more popular?
Yeah. There’s the disgust-fueled disliking of “low” groups and then there’s envy-fueled disliking of “high” groups which is never admitted in those terms, often these exists in combination with one another. Previously the dislike toward survivalists was based on the former, it was a waste of money, they’re LARPing, they’re trying to cope with an inability to succeed in the modern world. Now a lot of it is based on envy, “how dare they cause these shortages … and I wish I had done that!”
My dislike of the typical survivalist:
1) Millennial Christian eschatology.
2) Expecting a fall and thus not caring enough to prevent it (e.g. climate change).
3) The sheer amount of resource usage necessary to stockpile for years and its effect on the environment (see point 2).
4) “I’ve got mine, screw you” mindset, when what they are doing would not have been possible without everyone else doing their part to make it possible.
Yeah, sure, this doesn’t represent all survivalists. It may not even represent most of them (I truly don’t know). But that’s what I dislike about the orientation. It has nothing to do with social status at all.
To be fair, the real survivalists probably aren’t creating shortages. People who just became a survivalist after reading some websites a week ago, maybe.
@Loriot
One would think that actual preppers were, you know, prepared and already had a ten-year supply of toilet paper. I would not expect this nuance to reach the editorial page of the New York Times, however.
@anonymousskimmer,
The vast majority of people aren’t doing anything to prevent climate change, so how can you condemn survivalists in particular for not doing anything? Is it because they’ve interacted with the problems climate change might cause though prepping, and thus are more morally guilty than normies who also don’t do anything to prevent climate change? Do you subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics? It’s interesting because I’ve never heard some say explicitly “yes, I do.”
The question I’d ask is “compared to what?” Survivalists have to use their own money to do this, money that can’t be used for other types of consumption.
It’s not like their food stockpiles are being funded by the government. Yes, they’re using the publicly funded roads, bridges, etc. You could go back and forth on it with them saying ‘I pay taxes to fund that, blah blah blah.’ But granting the point that they are insufficiently grateful and aren’t giving enough back, doesn’t that also apply to most other people? This seems like the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics here, they are interacting with these problems and are thus acquire more blame for them.
@Alexander Turok
I’m not condemning them for doing nothing about climate change, I’m condemning them for buying up unnecessary resources (which add to climate burden), and condemning them for the same thing I condemn so many others: not giving a crap. This last condemnation isn’t specific to them (and for the rare survivalist who is a “live off the land” log cabin survivalist, I’m actually throwing a thumbs up to them).
I’m not a Copenhagger. In an ideal universe, sure, but there’s only so much time, attention, effort, and caring.
I think I’m mostly annoyed that I’ve never heard of survivalists mentioning this problem, and less by what side they come down on.
This is more a reaction to Heinlein’s protagonist in Farnham’s Freehold than any real survivalist I know of. I don’t like domineering jerks who think that because they have a relative abundance of something this gives them the moral right to order others around, or let others die.
Fair enough, I’ve probably been a bit too harsh in my preconceptions.
@anonymousskimmer
I’m not sure you know much about preppers. They’re big on sustainability because they’re expecting to have to sustain a modest lifestyle indefinitely. If you’re mad at people for “not giving a crap” about climate change, you’re barking up the wrong tree. You need to be pointing your fingers at the concrete jungle city dwellers, not the guy living off the grid with his own solar power, aquafarm, rain reclamation system and organic garden.
@Conrad Honcho
You’ve just described a rich (or rural) prepper. Is this a typical prepper?
Are there urban preppers?
Yes. The one person who is plausibly labeled a prepper that I know is suburban. You don’t have to be rural to have go-bags, multiple 50 lb. bags of beans and rice, and colloidal silver. (By the way, make sure you sort the beans for rocks. The LDS bean bags aren’t your typical pre-sorted supermarket beans.)
Why do the Latter Day Saints leave rocks in the beans? They trying to cheat bulk shoppers?!
Disagreed. FDR bungled the start of WWII far worse than this, and he’s venerated.
The problem with the Iraq War is that Bush didn’t ever “win” it. If we beat coronavirus and do better than most of the West, banging on about testing capacity in January will be viewed the same way that Republican criticism of FDR for Pearl Harbor is today.
@Atlas
The United States lost the Philippines because of it. With our full fleet operational, the Japanese believed that they couldn’t sustain operations long enough to hold them. It was a big deal.
Would you conceded that the opposite is true? If the USA comes out of this with better numbers than Western Europe, it turns out the initial stages were less of a big deal than we thought and Trump did a fine job.
@Atlas
I am hoping our response ends up good. It’s looking like we have a chance. We have a death rate per capita amongst the best in the West (tied with Germany, which is still earlier in its outbreak), are finally testing at an really good pace and have plenty of places with excess capacity to help NYC.
How did FDR ‘bungle’ the start of WW2? Getting sneak attacked while your military isn’t really ready for war is a bit different from mismanaging a pandemic emergency.
It also probably helped that iirc FDR always gave the impression of taking Japan/Germany seriously, as opposed to ‘it’s a hoax by China’, ‘it’s a hoax by Democrats’, ‘it’s just the flu’, ‘fuck you for daring to question me’ and ‘it’s not actually that bad, my enemies are just out to get me’, which is a lot of what Trump’s come out with in this crisis.
@Desrbwb
They’re basically identical. You see that a problem is spreading around the world but you don’t actually prepare for it to come to your shores.
The United States, under Roosevelt, spent thirteen percent of GDP on national defense in 1940, specifically preparing for its nigh-inevitable involvement in World War II. Not literally “coming to our shores”, but that’s because of the four battleships and four aircraft carriers launched by the United States between 1937 and 1941, with eight and eleven more respectively in various stages of construction. Plus about three hundred lesser warships. The United States began conscripting soldiers to fight World War II in 1940. To me, this sounds like actually preparing for war, first guaranteeing that it can’t come to our shores and then preparing to go take it to the enemy’s shores and put a permanent end to it,
@John Schilling
And it was fucked up by the people actually executing the policy, leading to a massive bungling of the start of the war.
Sort of like an executive who declared a public health emergency on January 31st and then the FDA and the CDC incompetently executed it, leading to a bungled start.
No. The US war plans had moved from “straight to Manila” to island-hopping well before Pearl Harbor. We expected to lose the Philippines and have to retake them.
Only one of the people, and unfortunately not the one who got the axe for it. Pearl Harbor was the Japanese doing something insane, and getting away with it by great good luck. Unfortunately, Kimmel et al ended up as scapegoats for it. MacArthur bungled the start of the war in the Philippines, and somehow managed to retain his command. (This does not contradict the above, but does perhaps explain part of how he got away with it. Most of his air force was caught on the ground hours after Pearl Harbor, but he was a better politician than he was a general, and probably spun it as “nobody could have done better”.)
@bean
I agree, and history still debates exactly who fucked up and to what degree.
My point is that an administration screwing up the early stages of a problem doesn’t mean that history will remember them as having a blackened legacy.
Substitute Truman and Korea for the exact same point.
Americans care about results. A messed up start can be forgiven by a strong victory at the end.
Edit:
Just saw your edits. We lost the Philippines because the Japanese war plans, IIRC, were not to even attack the Philippines if they couldn’t neutralize the American fleet. I am aware of our doctrinal change, but they weren’t.
I do not believe that this is correct. It is moot, because the Japanese could in fact neutralize the American fleet and there’s nothing FDR could reasonably have done to prevent it. As bean notes, a shift in luck could have done it, but FDR and the War Department did what could be done and the Japanese got a good result on their “surprise” role.
But the plan to invade the Philippines was an Army plan, not a Navy one, it was not conditional on the Navy neutralizing the American fleet at Pearl, and in fact the order was given to invade the Philippines before the attack on Pearl had occurred.
If, somehow, the American fleet had escaped destruction at Pearl, then we’d probably still have lost the Philippines. If the American fleet had escaped destruction at Pearl and MacArthur had mounted a much more effective early defense, maybe, but that’s not something that can be pinned on FDR.
@John Schilling
Thanks and I will defer to your superior knowledge of Japanese war plans. My recollection comes from Freedom Betrayed, which I acknowledge is an anti-FDR polemic. Plus Hoover liked MacArthur.
The level of incompetence shown is actually quite similar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time
However, you’re right that FDR’s PR was much better. “Under-promise and over-deliver” is a good playbook for retaining support during national emergencies. If FDR had Trump’s mentality he would have been going on about what a pip-squeak the Japanese were and how America could crush them in a few months.
I’m not sure the Second Happy Time was FDR’s fault any more than the issues in the Philippines were. In hindsight, the idea of an unescorted convoy works, but it was an outgrowth of OR work later in the war. And they simply didn’t have escorts to spare for coastal shipping after protecting the transatlantic convoys. The planned alternative was safe havens along the coast protected by mines, but it didn’t work very well. I would suspect that Anglophobia among the Navy’s upper echelons played a part in the poor decision-making. As for blackout enforcement, that’s not something I can speak to offhand.
Iraq and the coronavirus aren’t even in the same ballpark. “Imperfect response to external natural disaster” versus “deliberately created disastrous war.” For the situations to be comparable you would need Trump saying “hey everybody, let’s all go get this plague on purpose that otherwise we wouldn’t be anywhere near, it’ll be fine.”
Wont any decently objective narrative of the C-19 crisis (if it ends up being important enough to include) have to include a large section about how during most of the beginning of the pandemic the House was impeaching him, then holding onto the impeachment articles, then demanding various other impeachment things in the Senate for an unrelated matter?
That is what a history book would look like. Either impeachment is the topic and C-19 is a footnote, or C-19 is a topic and impeachment distracting the nation is sideplot of importance, like the Siege of Vicksburg.
The two issues will be covered separately, with some other unrelated topic in between, and the timelines will be de-emphasized, such that the “Trump was impeached for corruption” storyline and the “Trump murdered millions by botching COVID” storylines are seen as independent events, unrelated to each other.
That isn’t how WW1 and Spanish flu is treated.
Because WW1 was the vector for Spanish Flu.
Confirmation bias is a helluva drug.
You know me and my preexisting pro-Cuomo biases. 🙂
Speaking as an unbiased observer, we should compliment Ohio while we’re at it, whose response was swifter and more extensive than most states’ early on.
And apparently good responses often go unnoticed, so let’s add “good job Ohio” to the bucket!
Ohio’s governor has been out front. Notably, he violated a court order forbidding him to do so and postponed our March 17 primary. (The governor ultimately won in the state supreme court, but was prepared to take a “how many legions does the judge have” approach.)
It still baffles me that other states held their primaries that day – what stupider thing can there be than to ask people to stand in line for half an hour, at which point they will meet with a bunch of elderly volunteers?
Shouldn’t the list of losers include private health care? Because it suddenly turned out that if someone’s too poor/careless to pay for their medical insurance, it’s everyone’s problem in the world where contagious diseases is a thing.
Also it’s (ironically) more niche, but people who’re concerned about biosecurity and existential risks in general are getting a lot of political credibility out of this crisis.
Yeah, Italy and their dumb private health care!
Italy is 5k cases behind the US now. And it was tens of thousands ahead yesterday.
Italy also has a fifth the population.
Too early to tell. The country getting wrecked hardest by this has universal health care. If Germany/Switzerland/USA do much better, private health care may be seen as a winner.
I’d say the jury is still out on this one. It could end up that way, but if things continue as they are right now and Europe is hit much, much harder than the US, then I could easily see it spun the opposite.
How you pay for medical bills has nearly nothing to do with how you manage public health issues.
It theoretically effects how effective your healthcare providers are.
Add alcohol regulators to the wall of shame. Here’s a distillery talking about how they’re trying to gear up to produce hand sanitizer, but are held back by rules requiring them to add poison to it to make sure the government gets their tax revenue.
Those rules are evil and nuts and always have been.
Those rules are evil and nuts and always have been.
Q. Why is methylated spirits blue?
A. To identify it.
Q. Why does it need to be identified in such a way?
A. Because humans, being “evil and nuts and always have been” drink it. In the words of my deceased granny, “you’d drink piss if it was in a bottle”.
Q. But what is so bad about drinking it?
A. “Despite its poisonous content, denatured alcohol is sometimes consumed as a surrogate alcohol. This can result in blindness or death if it contains methanol. For instance, during the Prohibition in the United States, federal law required methanol in domestically manufactured industrial alcohols. From 25–27 December 1926, which was roughly at the midpoint of the “Noble Experiment” of nationwide alcohol prohibition, 31 people in New York City alone died of methanol poisoning. To help prevent this, denatonium is often added to give the substance an extremely bitter flavour. Substances such as pyridine are added to give the mixture an unpleasant odour, and agents such as syrup of ipecac may also be included to induce vomiting.”
If you don’t think there aren’t people out there crazy/desperate enough to drink anything (more Irish slang: “he’d lick it off a sore leg”), I’m very glad you’ve only lived your entire life amongst nice, sane, reasonable people.
That does not mean such rules ‘have always been evil and nuts’.
Yes, the tax-raising revenue on pure alcohol probably has to do with this. But our guy (who is some craft distiller and not a large concern, I had to search to find out who he actually was as a distiller and ignore all the “Skip on Twitter” result which are the first ones that come up) isn’t complaining about that, he’s complaining about having to comply with “change my formulation so that the ethanol isn’t drinkable by adding in these things”.
I do wonder about that, because the Irish distilleries both small-scale and multi-national corporations seem to have had no similar problems and God knows, we’ve enough experience with drinking problems in Ireland. Maybe it’s just more of ‘fiddly American regulations’ which should be relaxed, or maybe ol’ Skipperino is just trying to make himself out to be a martyr and get free PR for his craft distillery on Twitter.
Because I’m damn sure if his tiny project sold a few gallons of ‘hand sanitiser’ without such additives to somebody who drank it, or a bunch of teens who think this is a great idea to get their hands on cheap brain-blaster and drank it, and they died or had significant health problems from alcohol poisoning, it would feckin’ well sink his business with the legal fees to defend a case brought by families about “how dare you sell bootleg liquor to the vulnerable you profiteering blackguard! also the government should have Done Something so this couldn’t happen!”
Jails can’t have hand sanitizer because desperate people drink it.
(Doesn’t excuse them not having soap).
The thing you have to remeber about meths is that ethanol used to be used extensively in rocketry and torpedoes.
Militaries tended to encounter anomalously high …evaporation rates… when working with ethanol as a fuel.
And it’s not like you can’t disinfect your hands with meths. I’ve a little spray bottle full of 70%.
Putting something in to make it unpalatable is not crazy or evil but adding poison to your drinkable alcohol so it can be sold for other purposes means adding a poisoning risk to children, animals, and dumb people in order to make sure you can collect taxes properly. This seems like a terrible policy to me.
@albatross11, Gorbachev did an anti-alcohol campaign which involved raising taxes on vodka. This led to an increase in people using surrogate alcohols and poisoning themselves. But this was a drop in the bucket compared to the reduction in deaths from ordinary alcohol. It’s not just so “taxes can be collected.” It’s so that the price will be high and consumption will be deterred.
Don’t underestimate the bums out there…
People can and do drink hand sanitizer.
Better poison it, then!
Better poison it, then!
If it’s got additives in that make it too bitter/unpleasant to drink, or something that will make you vomit it back up, that’s technically poison but the function is to prevent you drinking enough to do serious damage – up to killing yourself- by imbibing this. I honestly do think that the thicket of regulations around this comes from the specific American circumstances, viz. the aftermath of Prohibition. In the wake of that, in order to crack down on and control, and to prevent people from starting up bathtub distilleries claiming to be producing alcohol for perfumes, solvents and every purpose other than “selling it as rotgut”, these limitations came in.
I am sufficiently (1) bored sitting around at home (2) contrarian that it made me look up regulations about “what are the rules on denatured alcohol?” Extracts below (IANAL so this is only my lay estimation of what headings this would come under):
Now maybe it is tough, difficult and expensive for Our Hero to get his hands on methyl alcohol and denatonium benzoate, but them’s the breaks. Bitching about it on Twitter isn’t going to help anyone.
Fun Facts I’ve just discovered by looking up denatonium benzoate – they put it into dish detergent to stop kids drinking it (remember the whole fuss about Tide Pods?) and “In livestock farming, denatonium benzoate is used to prevent cannibalism in pigs and aspiration mastitis in cattle”.
You’re treating the poison as if it’s a fact of nature that we’re trying to work around. It’s not.
The regulations require them to make it poisonous. This is not to prevent people from drinking enough to do serious damage. It is to make it so that drinking enough will do damage. That way, if you want to drink something, you need to buy the stuff with the high taxes on it, and the cheaper stuff with the poison added can be used for industrial purposes.
If I build a bridge across some rapids and you don’t want to pay my toll, them’s the breaks. If a build a bridge across a river and then put mines in the river so you can’t swim across, I’m the baddie.
I can’t imagine that the quasi-open borders advocacy that’s been going on is going to survive the Coronavirus.
I hope it does.
General disclaimer, not American, so can only make external observations.
“Despite the media narrative that he is personally forcing people to consume fish tank cleaner and responsible for not shutting all the borders down, fixing the FDA, CDC and WHO, Trump is a big winner so far.”
While I might be missing something here (I admittedly have no idea what the ‘fish tank cleaner’ thing is) but the FDA and CDC are federal agencies right? So if the agencies weren’t in a position to address this crisis, why is it wrong for Trump to be blamed? He’s the boss, the buck should stop with him. He’s also the one who disbanded the Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense and Complex Crises Fund. Instead of ‘media narrative unfairly maligns President’ the reality looks far more like ‘media points out legitimate things Trump has done wrong, but thanks to a mix of polarised base and ‘scared people wanting to trust the powers that be are in control’ his polling numbers haven’t taken a hit (though despite the ‘60% of Americans’ thing apparently he’s still only on around 49% approval)’.
“The media in general. Getting into slap fights with everyone and trying to gaslight on what they were saying at the start of the month has tanked their already bad credibility.”
This baffles me, got to be honest. Why is this a negative for the media, but Trump is still a ‘winner’? Trump is about the most ‘slap fight happy’ public individual currently in the limelight. This is the man who from day 1 has been doing his damnedest to politicise the emergency, claiming for basically all of February that the Democrats were just looking to smear him, saying the number of new cases was about to fall away to nothing, that America had tests for anyone who wanted one, ‘it’s not even as bad as the flu’ etc. Not to mention stuff like the recent response when asked about a message for frightened Americans and got “I tell them you are a terrible reporter.”
This just sounds more like a prior position of ‘Trump Good. Media Bad’ rather than an accurate critique of how both entities have handled the crisis thus far.
Trump mentioned that there had been early success in France using hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus and that he hoped it would pan out. Someone in Arizona took a fish cleaner that contained chloroquine phosphate and died.
Because civil servants in the States can’t be fired. The screw up by the CDC was technical in nature (one of the reagents for the test was missing) and far below Trump’s level. The FDA has forever been the slowest regulatory agency in advancing new goals. This culture predates Trump and will postdate him.
That office was only created in 2015. Trump didn’t disband it, just reorganize it into a different directorate.
Because the media are the ones that are being blamed and losing credibility here. Gallup backs me up. Less than 45% think the media are doing a good job during this crisis.
My prior position is indeed Trump good. I’ve never concealed my priors.
But most Americans agree with my assessment so far. When a President who has had approval ratings in the mid 40s spikes up to 60% approving of how he’s doing with this, it’s not just my bias.
Here’s what Trump said (he may have said other things on Twitter, I don’t follow it) starting at the 50 second mark in the included video:
bold and “don’t go” parenthetical added by me.
Note that Chloroquine phosphate is the form used in the medication as well as the fishtank antibiotic (people are calling this a “fishtank cleaner”, when its intended use is not as a “cleaner”, but to kill undesired organisms colonizing the fishtank – e.g. its use as an anti-malarial in humans: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/chloroquine-phosphate.192309/). The active ingredient is the same, but the fishtank form generally isn’t of pharmaceutical-grade purity, and certainly isn’t the correct dose.
I mean, he specifically said “as planned”. Clearly ingesting a concentrated form designed for killing things is not that.
On the list of Trump’s sins, this is roughly like saying “caffeine is great for keeping you awake, and we know it’s safe” and someone takes 2g of it and dies.
He downplayed the seriousness of the side effects of this medication.
Don’t do that man. It’s indefensible.
https://www.crediblemeds.org/blog/covid-19-experimental-therapies-and-tdp-risk/
TdP arrhythmia can cause death.
C’mon, he was no more downplaying it than if you read the Wikipedia entry. It’s on the WHO’s list of safest and most effective medicines. There are 7 known cases of lethal overdose in English literature. There are lots of “safe” medications that can kill you if you don’t follow the proper dosing. I don’t think taking a handful of fish chemicals counts as “proper dosing”, and you can’t blame that one on anyone but the guy dumb enough to try it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine
Again, Trump didn’t just mention hydroxychloroquine, he explicitly mentioned chloroquine as well.
And not all deaths are a result of overdoses. Thus my linking to the TdP article. Death can be a result of a known serious side effect of both chloroquine and the safer hydroxychloroquine.
From a public policy perspective, IMO, Trump needs to get off his marketing pitch soapbox and act like the manager he was elected to be.
And again, chloroquine is on the WHO’s list of essential medicines. When someone says a drug is safe, it’s usually with the understanding that you are taking the drug under the advice and monitoring of a healthcare professional. If you develop an arrhythmia because of a drug you are taking, you should be taken off of that drug.
people are calling this a “fishtank cleaner”
I wondered what the heck the whole “he recommends people to drink fishtank cleaner” reference was about!
I’ve seen people touting this as a wonder cure all on their ownio, before Trump said anything, several of them in the rationalist/rationalist-adjacent community.
I have my doubts about Miracle Cures, but if you have people insisting they’re smart enough, experienced enough, and scientifically literate enough to make their own decisions on what drugs might work and trying to lay their hands on this stuff, blaming Trump for “he’s encouraging people to poison themselves” is simply partisan booing.
I’d fully expect certain sections of commentary to criticise him for not recommending this, on the same general principles of “if he’s for it, we’re agin’ it”.
I’m no fan of Trump, but I think blaming Trump for some idiot self-medicating because he talked about a promising treatment for COVID-19 in public is an extremely isolated demand for {scientific, medical} rigor from a politician. In an alternative world where Hillary was president and made a similar comment and someone did the same thing, the people blaming Trump for this would not be blaming Hillary, and some who are defending Trump would be blaming her.
If I say there’s evidence that hand sanitizer helps prevent the spread of COVID-19, and you drink a gallon of hand sanitizer and die, the problem was not with my statement….
I blame Trump for constantly acting as a salesman. The situation calls for selling certain behaviors to people. It calls for some degree of optimism. But seriously, please tone it down and act more like a manager.
Not everything is huge, powerful, safe, etc….
Tone it down.
I am going to point out that from my point of view, the scientist who did the study and his study has been violently attacked by both doctor and the skeptic community, the study because its quality is abysmal, the scientist because he made a lot of promotion on this pitiful study. It is enthusiastically supported by the usual anti science on the left and right, plus the “elite are means to us” crowd.
Using that study as a reference in a speech is a colossal failure on Trump’s expert.
Note that there’s no reason you can’t have a low opinion of both Trump and the media….
Seriously. “[The media] getting into slap fights with everyone and trying to gaslight on what they were saying at the start of the month has tanked their already bad credibility,” complains the Trump supporter.
Why, it’s almost like neither the media nor the politicians are especially good sources of information.
Trump being at 49% approval is a major increase for Trump. It means some people who dislike Trump for the majority of his Presidency are digging Trump’s response to this crisis, since 49% is basically a high water-mark for him. The 538 tracker definitely shows an upward swing for him.
That may change depending on how bad this crisis gets. I think people are getting WAY too confident with predictions on a crisis that is changing every single hour. For all we know, Trump has the virus and he is going to be dead in 2 weeks.
To be fair, I prefaced my post with “this week”!
According to Nate Silver, Trump has received a notable bump, but less than other world leaders such as Boris Johnson. It remains to be seen whether that will stick or whether it is just a temporary rally around the flag effect, but reactions to the future course of the pandemic are likely to swamp it in any case.
Last week, according to survey, the French government response was good. This week, it’s bad.